Category Archives: Soviet Union

I haven’t done an update on Kyrgyzstan in several days.  While things seemed to have calmed in the southern part of the country, tensions are high, the humanitarian crisis is deep, and the political outcomes are uncertain.

Two questions have been occupying most commentators:  Why the violence, or, specifically why didn’t we see it coming? and What are the international ramifications, particularly for the US and Russia?  I’m personally less interested in the second question, and for the most part discussion on this has ranged from the ludicrous (for how ludicrous see Michael Hancock’s undressing on Registan), the paranoiac and uninformed, the all too typical, to the regurgitated.  Basically, I’ll leave it to the foreign policy wоnks to untangle this mess.  I just hope to hear something new as they do.

The “why” question, however, is the thing that seems ..read more

I know it’s quite out of date at this point. I had planned to share some impressions and photos from Victory Day a few weeks ago but my self-imposed hiatus got in the way.  I had pretty much abandoned the idea, but then a colleague of mine posted her thoughts and I said to myself, why the hell not.  Otherwise, my impressions would have just remained in my head and the pictures exiled to the abyss that is my hard drive.

Basically, my impressions can be summed up as follows:

1.  Security nightmare.

This picture from Chekhovskya station is indicative of the security hell that the Moscow authorities concocted on Victory Day.  I understand that heavy security was necessary.  There were rumors, theories, and expectations that  another terrorist attack would occur on Victory Day.   Nevertheless, I couldn’t help note the irony that what was done to provide security only ..read more

Two things hit me as I emerged from the Oktyabrskaya metro station on Saturday morning to check out the KPRF May Day march.  First was that God himself must have been smiling down on the KPRFers.  After several days of on and off rain, his holiness decided to part the clouds, let the sun shine through, and let Russian commies do their thing without the hindrance of rainfall.  The second thing that hit me was that unlike most, or should I say every political rally I’ve been to, the Communists began marching on time.  Who would have ever guessed Communists to be prompt.  And they say Leninist discipline is dead.  As soon as I pushed through the heavy glass metro doors, I had to quicken my step to catch up with the dancing red flags on the move.

Luckily, ..read more

I don’t usually comment on American politics.  I rarely devote my time to reading about the place.  The level of hyperbole and rhetorical inanity makes me want to vomit.  Also, since I’ve been in Moscow, the US looks even crazier than it does when I’m there (the strange effect of this is that Russian politics looks downright normal).  I’ve also totally shied away from US-Russia foreign policy issues.  I used to.  Not anymore. There are people out there who do it better, and frankly, the debate is so locked in Cold War binaries, I can’t help to find it all a bit boring, repetitive, and quite nauseating.  So if you’re here looking for a treatise on START, ruminations on the Great Game, or how America is encircling Russia or how Russia is an empire “resurgent,” I suggest you point your mouse elsewhere.

BUT . . . ..read more

co-written with Maya Haber Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin, Cornell University Press, 2009.

Studies of the Soviet gulag encompass a cottage industry of its own in Russian historiography.  Since 1991, a torrent of studies have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy.  Few, however, have delved into how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over 4 million prisoners from labor camps and colonies to society between 1953 and 1958.  It is for this reason that Miriam Dobson‘s Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin is a welcomed and refreshing edition to so-called “Gulag Studies.”

In it we don’t find the heroic gulag returnee (“Khrushchev’s zeks,” as Stephen Cohen affectionately calls them), who was unjustly persecuted under Stalin for his political views, but more a tragic figure whose finds himself indelibly marked by his years ..read more

Two weeks ago, I did a post on 75 years since the Kirov law.  I was happy to find that the New Times published an interview with Matthew Lenoe whose forthcoming book, Kirov’s Murder and Soviet History, is a hefty reexamination of the famous assassination.  Below is a translation I did of the interview.

*****

“Stalin used Kirov’s murder as justification for mass executions”

by Evgeniia Albats

Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee, VKP(b), was killed by a shot to the back of the head. The bloody bacchanalia known in history as the Great Terror followed. Violence became the means to rule an huge country. Show trials of then leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Rykov, who were all accused of the murder, became the symbol of Stalinist justice.  Millions of people, including almost all of the Society of Political Prisoners ..read more