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In Estonia, as in other Eastern European countries, the Stalinist era remains in the center of attention of historians. Politics, repression and resistance dominate the historiography, while everyday life is definitely under-represented. This book attempts to close the gap and focuses on different aspects of everyday life in Stalinist Estonia.
In 1940, Estonia was first occupied and then annexed by the Soviet Union. The process of Sovietization started immediately and was accompanied by a thorough reconstruction of the economy. This monograph looks in detail at the different stages of economic restructuring of a country to be remodeled according to the Soviet example. Exploitation, violence, and declining living standards formed part of the process under Stalinist rule. Different sectors of the economy, but also the demographic development, are analyzed. By the end of Stalinism, the outcome indicated a disaster.
Draws on documentation released since the fall of the Soviet Union to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century.
This essay anthology offers enlightening perspectives on how East-Central Europe was transformed into the “other” Europe during the Cold War era. When the Second World War ended, a new conflict arose between world powers jockeying for supremacy. The Soviet Union pursued a policy of exporting its system of government in a process known as sovietization. But there were also governments that sought to adopt a Soviet way of life on their own accord. Dictated by ideological imperatives, both styles of sovietization employed socialist strategies of state and nation building. This volume not only examines the imposition of new forms of government, but also the socialist response to modernity as...
Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular national histories, their representations, the meanings given to them and their uses, which expands outside the confines of Western Europe and the US. It draws a picture of popular histories which is European in the full sense of this term. One of its fortes is the inclusion of Eastern Europe. The cross-national angle of Popularizing National Pasts is apparent in the scope of its comparative project, as well as that of the longue durée it covers. Apart from essays on Britain, France, and Germany, the collection includes studies of popular histories in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, nota...
Appearing on the world stage in 1918, Lithuania suffered numerous invasions, border changes and large scale population displacements.The successive occupations of Stalin in 1940 and Hitler in 1941, mass deportations to the Gulag and the elimination of the Jewish community in the Holocaust gave the horrors of World War II a special ferocity. Moreover, the fighting continued after 1945 with the anti-Soviet insurrection, crushed through mass deportations and forced collectivization in 1948-1951. At no point, however, did the process of national consolidation take a pause, making Lithuania an improbably representative case study of successful nation-building in this troubled region. As postwar r...
This edited volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the ‘Baltic question’, which arose within the context of the Cold War, and which has previously received little attention. This volume brings together a group of international specialists on the international history of northern Europe. It combines country-based chapters with more thematic approaches, highlighting above all the political dimension of the Baltic question, locating it firmly in the context of international politics. It explores the policy decision-making mechanisms which sustained the Western non-recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic States after 1940 and which eventually led to the legal restoration of the three countries’ statehood in 1991. The wider international ramifications of this doctrine of legal continuity are also examined, within the context both of the Cold War and of relations between post-soviet Russia and the enlarging ‘Euro-Atlantic area’. The book ends with an examination of how this Cold War legacy continues to shape relations between Russia and the West.
In the Khrushchev era, Soviet citizens were newly encouraged to imagine themselves exploring the medieval towers of Tallinn's Old Town, relaxing on the Romanian Black Sea coast, even climbing the Eiffel Tower. By the mid 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens each year crossed previously closed Soviet borders to travel abroad. All this is your World explores the revolutionary integration of the Soviet Union into global processes of cultural exchange in which a de-Stalinizing Soviet Union increasingly, if anxiously, participated in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. Anne E. Gorsuch examines what it meant to be "Soviet" in a country no longer defined as Stalini...
This book surveys the experiences of non-Russian USSR citizens both during and following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Art and the Challenge of Markets Volumes 1 & 2 examine the politics of art and culture in light of the profound changes that have taken place in the world order since the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors explore how in these two decades, the neoliberal or market-based model of capitalism started to spread from the economic realm to other areas of society. As a result, many aspects of contemporary Western societies increasingly function in the same way as the private enterprise sector under traditional market capitalism. The first volume of this two-volume collection considers a broad range of national cultural policies from European and North American countries, and examines the strengtheni...