Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War

Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War
Author: Rina Lapidus
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134516908

This book deals with the work of fifteen young Jewish poets who were killed, died of wounds, or were executed in captivity while serving in the Red Army in the Second World War. All were young, all were poets, most were thoroughly assimilated into Soviet society whilst at the same time being rooted in Jewish culture and traditions. Their poetry, written mostly in Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian, was coloured by their backgrounds, by the literary and cultural climate that prevailed in the Soviet Union, and was deeply concerned with their expectation of impending death at the hands of the Nazis. The book examines the poets’ backgrounds, their lives, their poetry and their deaths. Like the experiences and poetry of the British First World War poets, the lives and poems of these young Jewish poets are extremely interesting and deeply moving.

Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War

Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War
Author: Rina Lapidus
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134516835

This book deals with the work of fifteen young Jewish poets who were killed, died of wounds, or were executed in captivity while serving in the Red Army in the Second World War. All were young, all were poets, most were thoroughly assimilated into Soviet society whilst at the same time being rooted in Jewish culture and traditions. Their poetry, written mostly in Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian, was coloured by their backgrounds, by the literary and cultural climate that prevailed in the Soviet Union, and was deeply concerned with their expectation of impending death at the hands of the Nazis. The book examines the poets’ backgrounds, their lives, their poetry and their deaths. Like the experiences and poetry of the British First World War poets, the lives and poems of these young Jewish poets are extremely interesting and deeply moving.

Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army, 1939-1945

Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Author: Allen J. Frank
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2022-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004515380

Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army is the first study of the wartime experience of Soviet Kazakhs. Based on indigenous-language sources, it focuses on the wartime experiences of Kazakh conscripts and the home front as expressed in correspondence.

The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders

The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders
Author: Carol Any
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0810142767

Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies The Soviet Writers’ Union offered writers elite status and material luxuries in exchange for literature that championed the state. This book argues that Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin chose leaders for this crucial organization, such as Maxim Gorky and Alexander Fadeyev, who had psychological traits he could exploit. Stalin ensured their loyalty with various rewards but also with a philosophical argument calculated to assuage moral qualms, allowing them to feel they were not trading ethics for self‐interest. Employing close textual analysis of public and private documents including speeches, debate transcripts, personal letters, and diaries, Carol Any exposes the misgivings of Writers’ Union leaders as well as the arguments they constructed when faced with a cognitive dissonance. She tells a dramatic story that reveals the interdependence of literary policy, communist morality, state‐sponsored terror, party infighting, and personal psychology. This book will be an important reference for scholars of the Soviet Union as well as anyone interested in identity, the construction of culture, and the interface between art and ideology.

Languages of Trauma

Languages of Trauma
Author: Peter Leese
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 148753941X

This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are frequently beyond the sphere of medical, legal, or state intervention. To address these different, often intertwined modes of language, the contributors provide a variety of disciplinary approaches to foster innovative debates and provoke new insights. Prevailing definitions of trauma can best be understood according to the cultural and historical conditions within which they exist. Languages of Trauma explores what this means in practice by scrutinizing varied historical moments from the First World War onwards and particular cultural contexts from across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa – striving to help decolonize the traditional Western-centred history of trauma, dissolving it into multifaceted transnational histories of trauma cultures.

In the Labyrinth of the KGB

In the Labyrinth of the KGB
Author: Olga Bertelsen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793608938

2024 Winner, Kjetil Hatlebrekke Memorial Book Prize, King's College Centre for the Study of Intelligence This book focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s–1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s–1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, “active measures” designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.

The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920-40

The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920-40
Author: Audrey Altstadt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-06-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317245431

The early Soviet Union’s nationalities policy involved the formation of many national republics, within which "nation building" and "modernization" were undertaken for the benefit of "backward" peoples. This book, in considering how such policies were implemented in Azerbaijan, argues that the Soviet policies were in fact a form of imperialism, with "nation building" and "modernization" imposed firmly along Soviet lines. The book demonstrates that in Azerbaijan, and more widely among western Turkic peoples, the Volga and Crimean Tatars, there were before the onset of Soviet rule, well developed, forward looking, secular, national movements, which were not at all "backward" and were different from the Soviets. The book shows how in the period 1920 to 1940 the two different visions competed with each other, with eventually the pre-Soviet vision of Azerbaijani culture losing out, and the Soviet version dominating in a new Soviet Azerbaijani culture. The book examines the details of this Sovietization of culture: in language policy and the change of the alphabet, in education, higher education and in literature. The book concludes by exploring how pre-Soviet Azerbaijani culture survived to a degree underground, and how it was partially rehabilitated after the death of Stalin and more fully in the late Soviet period.

The Russian Liberals and the Revolution of 1905

The Russian Liberals and the Revolution of 1905
Author: Peter Enticott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317245512

There is a widespread notion that Russia is forever fated to be an authoritarian country where liberalism and democracy can never make real progress. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century there was an extremely influential “liberationist” movement which culminated in the formation of a modern, Western-style liberal party, the Constitutional Democrats or “Kadets”. The book provides a comprehensive history of the rise of the Kadets, focusing, in particular, on the revolutionary years 1905-06. It outlines how they dominated the first Duma elected by the people and analyses their policies, social composition and political tactics. The book challenges the view (shared by many historians) that the Kadets were inherently extreme, doctrinaire or unwilling to compromise, and argues that their eventual failure was primarily due to the intransigence of the old régime. The Russian Liberals and the Revolution of 1905 illustrates, in detail, that the Kadets offered a moderate alternative to reaction on the one hand and revolution on the other.

The Vernaculars of Communism

The Vernaculars of Communism
Author: Petre Petrov
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2014-12-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317647483

The political revolutions which established state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were accompanied by revolutions in the word, as the communist project implied not only remaking the world but also renaming it. As new institutions, social roles, rituals and behaviours emerged, so did language practices that designated, articulated and performed these phenomena. This book examines the use of communist language in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. It goes beyond characterising this linguistic variety as crude "newspeak", showing how official language was much more complex – the medium through which important political-ideological messages were elaborated, transmitted and also contested, revealing contradictions, discursive cleavages and performative variations. The book examines the subject comparatively across a range of East European countries besides the Soviet Union, and draws on perspectives from a range of scholarly disciplines – sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, historiography, and translation studies. Petre Petrov is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin. Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Head of Russian and Academic Director of the Princess Dashkova Russia Centre in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.

The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered

The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered
Author: Laurien Crump
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2015-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317555295

The Warsaw Pact is generally regarded as a mere instrument of Soviet power. In the 1960s the alliance nevertheless evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained considerable scope for manoeuvre. This book examines to what extent the Warsaw Pact inadvertently provided its members with an opportunity to assert their own interests, emancipate themselves from the Soviet grip, and influence Soviet bloc policy. Laurien Crump traces this development through six thematic case studies, which deal with such well known events as the building of the Berlin Wall, the Sino-Soviet Split, the Vietnam War, the nuclear question, and the Prague Spring. By interpreting hitherto neglected archival evidence from archives in Berlin, Bucharest, and Rome, and approaching the Soviet alliance from a radically novel perspective, the book offers unexpected insights into international relations in Eastern Europe, while shedding new light on a pivotal period in the Cold War.