AbstractsSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 86, No. 2, The Relaunch of the SovietProject, 1945-64 (Apr., 2008), pp. 398-399Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479206 .

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SEER, Vol. 86, No. 2, April 2008

Abstracts Robust Revolution to Retiring Revolution: The Life Cycle of the Soviet

Revolution, 1945-1968 by Amir Weiner

The article addresses the three institutional pillars of the Soviet polity ?

political order of a single-party dictatorship with the distinctive feature of party-state bifurcation, economic order of non-market, non-private property economy, and a system of mass state terror ?

and the way they coped with particular circumstances between 1945 and 1968, especially the Second World War, the profound change in its composition (i.e., the renunciation of the mass terror), changes in the supreme leadership, generational change and interactions

with the outside world.

Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society by Juliane F?rst

Homeless and vagrant children were one of the most visible and traumatic consequences of the Soviet experience of World War Two. They were living testimony not only to the

physical destruction and hardship of a merciless war fought largely on Soviet territory but also to the ideological fractures in the Soviet system. The latter's doctrine of happy Soviet childhoods had to give way in the face of hundreds of thousands of needy and often delin

quent and disobedient children. This article examines the rhetoric that surrounded the

problem of child besprizornost ' and beznadzornost ', analyses Soviet society's responses to both

the phenomenon itself and to official policy dealing with the phenomenon, and reconstructs the world in which these 'non-Soviet' children of the post-war era lived. It argues that it

was precisely the high expectations of 'perfect Soviet childhoods' that prevented the

acknowledgment of post-war trauma and led to the ideological and physical exclusion of those who did not fit the narrative of quick integration and salvation. Ultimately, the way the Soviet system and society related to the problem of child homelessness and delin

quency reveals much of the political and ideological contradictions that were characteristic

for the late Stalinist years, yet also indicates how the central and defining Soviet device of integration through discriminatory exclusion was resurrected and maintained in the

decades to come.

Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet 'Struggle For Peace in All the World', 1948 54 by Timothy Johnston This article examines the Soviet 'Struggle for Peace in All the World' between 1948 and

1954. The 'Struggle for Peace' was a vital arena in the early Cold War within which a new

image of the Soviet relationship with the outside world was forged. 'Peace' emerged in this context as a shorthand for the USSR's muscular and moral patronage of the oppressed peoples of the world. Soviet citizens responded to the 'Struggle for Peace' with great enthusiasm. This enthusiasm has been cited as evidence that the Soviet population were

naively duped into accepting a harsh post-war settlement in return for peace. In reality, Soviet citizens were not so passive in their engagement with the late-Stalinist state. Drawing on Kotkin's description of the 'little tactics of the habitat' this article suggests that some

participants in the Peace Campaigns creatively reappropriated them as a platform for the

articulation of their personal grief from the past war and their pacifist sentiments. It also

offers some provisional suggestions about how the 'tactics' employed by Soviet citizens in

relation to the government changed after 1945. The Soviet government could mobilize

its population to 'Struggle for Peace', but it could not guarantee that they shared its

understanding of what 'peace' meant.

Individual Forms of Ownership in the Urban Housing Fund of the USSR,

1944-64 by Mark B. Smith Private property was abolished in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1922, but identifiable forms of individual ownership of urban housing persisted. Several tenures were always

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ABSTRACTS 399 present in the urban housing fund ? but each contained a varying component of indi vidual ownership. Late Stalinist reconstruction and then the Khrushchev-era mass housing programme decisively intensified the strength and reach of these components, in de facto and de jure terms. Although historians have largely neglected the existence of these possi bilities of individual ownership, they acted as an essential driver of post-war housing construction and were a defining feature of people's experience of their urban housing.

What Can and Cannot Be Said: Between the Stalinist Past and New Soviet Future by Cynthia Hooper

During successive waves of de-Stalinization, Nikita Khrushchev trumpeted the principle of

glasnost' as the key to Communist Party reform. At the same time, his revelations of past wrongdoing were always carefully tailored and chronically incomplete. Throughout his

reign, Kremlin-generated stories of the Stalin era shifted significantly over time, as did the extent of their allowed discussion; these shifts testified to the fact that post-Stalin professions of openness had failed to supplant more traditional Party practices of censorship and con

cealment. By looking at such changes, and at the way Party members in the regions of

Ekaterinburg and Samara responded to them, this article argues that the rhetoric of glas nost' triggered enormous conflict within the Party about openness in practice and drew

new, or at least newly vocal, attention to continuities in the top-down manipulation of truth.

POWs and Purge Victims: Attitudes towards Party Rehabilitation, 1956 57 by Miriam Dobson In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's Secret Speech three years later,

many Soviet citizens hoped that past injustices would now be put right. For some, this meant the right to rejoin the Communist Party. This article explores how former party members

? including many returning from the camps

? sought rehabilitation in the years

1956 to 1957. Focusing in particular on the party organization in Vladimir province, the article examines the differing ways POWs and purge victims were treated, and asks how far the decisions made by the party elite in this oblast' reflected central policy or local concerns.

Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw by Polly Jones This article analyses the cultural politics of memory in the late Thaw, during the period when Soviet literature confronted the Terror and other difficult episodes from the Stalinist

past most fully. Using published literature and a variety of archival sources, the article focuses on the different understandings of traumatic memory that emerged in party political discourse, literary criticism and literary works themselves after the public de-Stalinization of the 22nd Party Congress in 1961. While emphasizing the contested meanings of trauma and memory in the period, the article argues that pressure from party authorities and

editing and censorship practices ultimately led Soviet literature of the period to narrate the overcoming of trauma and to advocate an orientation to the future rather than to the Stalinist past.

Amateur Theatres and Amateur Publics in the Russian Republic, 1958?71 by Susan Costanzo

This examination of amateur theatres from 1957 to 1971 reveals that members of the edu cated public beyond the cultural elite were engaged in shaping the cultural landscape to suit their own preferences, if not necessarily state priorities. In their efforts to expand social criticism and stylistic innovation, 'amateur publics', consisting of amateurs and their sup porters, invoked the term 'civic spirit' {grazhdanstvennost) to explain artistic heterodoxy as a form of loyal criticism of Soviet society. Amateurs also pursued formal and informal mech anisms to improve troupes' material conditions and status in order to secure permanent sites for those critical views.

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