Dear Comrades, here is my first video fro you! Please watch it and/or read the transcript below. You can also turn on closed captioning with the video, but it is auto-generated and not entirely accurate. Remember to respond with your own posts by Friday at 5pm!
Transcript of the Video
Welcome to the online version of this course! Today’s teaching assistant is Dante. Let’s start with a few announcements. First, remember that from now on, you must do two blog posts a week. Your posts are due Fridays by 5pm. Second, If you do not have your copy of Russia’s Long Twentieth Century, the library has gotten us access to the eBook. I will post the link on the blog. I am also working on getting us scans of the two other books you’ll need in the coming weeks.
During the first half of this semester, most of our class meetings involved about half an hour of lecture. Now that we’ve gone online, we are going to set those lectures aside. It’s harder to concentrate on a lecture you watch online. There’s a certain energy that comes with us all being in the same room and being able to interact in real time. You guys, in particular, ask a lot of great questions. In our current situation, though, we can’t achieve that kind of interaction. I’m aware that you have limited time and limited attention that you can devote to this class. I’d rather spend that time on discussion, especially because our textbook, Russia’s Long Twentieth Century, does a good job of covering the historical context.
I’m going to start today with a brief summary of the points that I think are most essential for historical context. Then I’ll ask you some discussion questions based on chapter 8, and finally, I’ll ask you some discussion questions that go with the primary sources at the end of this chapter.
When we talk about the Late Stalinist period, which runs from the end of WWII in May 1945 through Stalin’s death in 1953, it’s important to pay attention both to domestic affairs (the process of postwar reconstruction) and international affairs (the rise of the Cold War).
Domestically, the Soviet Union threw itself into reconstruction. And it had a long way to go, because much of the fighting on the Eastern Front took place in Soviet territory, and that territory was just about destroyed. Amazingly, the Soviet Union did manage to return to its prewar industrial capacity by 1948. But as you read, this success was achieved on the backs of workers and peasants. Peasants, in particular, suffered during the Famine of 1946-1947, which was caused by drought, but made worse by the state’s refusal to commit to effective relief efforts. As a silver lining, this is the last time we’re going to talk about massive deaths of Soviet citizens in this class. It took us eight weeks, but we got there!
At the same time, the Soviet Union faced a lot of societal tension. Citizens who had accepted harsh sacrifices during the war were impatient to see their standard of living rise afterward. People were shocked when friends and family who had survived prisoner of war camps and slave labor in the Nazi Reich were then arrested and sent to the Gulag as traitors. And in Western Ukraine, which had been part of Poland between the world wars but was now incorporated into the Soviet Union, nationalist militias kept up active fighting though the late 1940s.
Stalin’s postwar ideological campaigns only added to these tensions. The zhdanovshchina introduced a strict crackdown on artists, intellectuals, and even jazz music. (We’ll talk about that more in the next lesson.) The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign brought anti-Semitism into the official sphere for the first time and suppressed expression of secular Jewish identity, which the Soviet state had previously supported. And the Doctor’s Plot, which accused Jewish doctors of plotting against the government, represented an even more serious threat to Soviet Jews and was only halted b Stalin’s death in 1953.
Amidst all of this, a new generation of Soviet citizens reached adulthood. They were much less interested in politics than their parents. What they really wanted to do was play sports, go dancing, and just generally have fun. They were also very interested in the West and had more information about it than ever before. Chapter 8 gives you a good sense of the new ways they were finding out about Western fashions, music, and slang, and for some young people, embracing the culture of the stiliagi.
So, that’s the domestic scene. On the international stage, the Cold War was on the rise. As we learned earlier, even during WWII, relations between the Allies were tense. And they only broke down further as these same countries negotiated how to put Europe back together after the war’s end. In 1947, the United States declared the Truman Doctrine, which stated that it would aid any country in the world facing an internal “threat.” Truman didn’t explicitly call it a threat from communism, but that’s what he meant, and everyone knew it. The same year, the US also launched the Marshall Plan, a massive aid program, which the Soviet Union took as a bid for hegemony in Europe. To counteract it, the Soviet Union established the Cominform in 1948, as a successor to the defunct Comintern. These moves essentially set up the two blocs that would dominate the second half of the 20th century: a Western Bloc cemented by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and an Eastern Bloc cemented by the Warsaw Pact. These blocs also divided Germany and the city of Berlin between them, though all parties had agreed in 1945 that this should not happen. Chapter 8 gives you more detail on this process. And of course, we can’t forget that the nuclear arms race soon came into the picture, with the Soviet Union developing its first atomic bomb in 1949.
The Eastern Bloc comprised seven countries besides the Soviet Union. It’s important to understand that these countries remained separate. They were not part of the Soviet Union, though they were heavily influenced by it. That’s why we call them “satellite states.” These countries are: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. (Yugoslavia was also a communist country in this era, but it did not join the Warsaw Pact.) These countries were all occupied by the Soviet Union as they drove the Nazis back to Berlin from 1943 to 1945. And as the Soviet forces retreated after the war, they established communist regimes to take over from them. In some countries, like Czechoslovakia, communism was genuinely popular at this time. Even so, the Soviets supported the Czech Communist Party in staging a coup to ensure thy would stay in power.
I think that’s what we need to know for this lesson! Let’s get to some discussion questions.
Leah’s Discussion Questions
1. The authors of our textbook point out that in the immediate postwar period, both the West and the Soviet Union made moves aimed at protecting their security interests and promoting their ideological interests. Each side viewed the other with suspicion, and each new move increased their mistrust of each other, resulting in the Cold War. Historians have long debated which side was more to blame for this situation. But I’d like you to consider, would it have been possible to avoid the Cold War? If so, what could each side have done differently to diffuse tensions? If not, what historical factors made this conflict a foregone conclusion?
2. Let’s consider the postwar ideological campaigns: the move against jazz, the promotion of Russian nationality, and particularly the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign. Can you analyze the relationship of these campaigns to the Cold War? What about their relationship to internal factors? Historians have debated whether external or internal factors were more significant; what do you think and why? How did these campaigns shape the way Soviet citizens thought about society and culture?
3. Consider the case of the stiliagi, the young people who loved Western music and fashion. What are some ways historians have explained their fascination? Which explanation do you find most convincing? The stiliagi saw themselves as uninterested in politics. But were their activities subversive after all?
4. Our authors explain that during the Cold War, both the West and the Soviet Union based their arguments for their superiority on the claim that their system could do the best job of providing for their citizens’ needs. They shared the idea of “the good life,” but they defined it differently. The West upheld the idea of choice: citizens had a vast array of consumer goods and could get anything they want. The Soviet Union, by contrast, upheld the idea of social services: citizens could live worry-free, because they had guaranteed housing, free healthcare, free education, and the right to work. Which of these definitions of “the good life” do you find most convincing and why?
I would also like you to analyze the primary sources on pp.171-174, using the discussion questions provided by our authors.
For added fun, you can also watch Nixon and Khrushchev’s 1959 “Kitchen Debate” on YouTube. Here it is!
