Our Comrades in Havana Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, 1959–1991
RADOSLAV YORDANOV In the immediate aftermath of its successful revolution, Cuba was heralded by socialist nations as the vanguard of communism in Latin America in the early 1960s. But by the late 1980s, Cuba’s inability to adopt the modes of socialist planning and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms had deeply soured the relationship between Havana and the Soviet-led socialist bloc. While secondary literature often highlights...
The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise
Brigid O’Keeffe This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and...
Fortress Dark and Stern
Wendy Z. Goldman, Donald Filtzer The first history of the Soviet home front experience during World War II and of the civilians who bore the burden of total war and played a critical role in the global victory over fascism. After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, German troops conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture and turned the occupied territories into mass killing fields. The country’s...
CfP: Soviet Underground and Parallel Cinema
deadline 1/8/2020 Proposals: 1 st of August 2020 Papers due: 15 th of October 2020 In the early 1980s, two moments of underground film — the so-called Parallel Cinema — emerge in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow. For the first time radical young filmmakers, painters and artists produce amateur films, mainly in 16mm, outside of Goskino’s state monopoly. While the Moscow school’s approach to film is shaped by the influence...
Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities
Richard C.M. Mole (ed.). Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities (Routledge, 2019) Despite Soviet Russia having been one of the first major powers to decriminalise homosexual acts between men, attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in contemporary Russia and the other post-Soviet states have become increasingly hostile, with the introduction of laws restricting their rights and an increase in homophobic...
