Soviet Union

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• 6/27/2021
  

  Ambitious for War: How German-Soviet Collaboration Set the Course for WWII

  by Ian Ona Johnson

  After the Treaty of Versailles and the Bolshevik Revolution, Germany and the Soviet Union forged a partnership of pariah governments to industrialize and arm their nations, and making inevitable the slaughter that unfolded in the eastern front of the second world war.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/6/2021
  

  ‘State Funeral’ Review: Saying Goodbye to Stalin

  Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary shows the aftermath of Josef Stalin's death, using footage shot at the time across the Soviet Union. 

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• SOURCE: Woodrow Wilson Center and National History Center
  4/9/2021
  

  Washington History Seminar – Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Monday, April 12

  Ronald Grigor Suny of the University of Michigan joins the Washington History Seminar on Monday, April 12 to discuss "Stalin: Passage to Revolution" at 

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• 3/28/2021
  

  Red Flags on the Map: What Soviet Kids Learned about the United States

  by David Mould

  One of the author's souvenirs from a research trip to Asia – a Soviet-era classroom map – prompts reflection on the pervasiveness of ideological education. 

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• 2/28/2021
  

  History and Film: Reflections on Konchalovsky’s “Dear Comrades!”

  by Walter G. Moss

  Andrei Konchalovsky's film "Dear Comrades" examines the struggles of ordinary people in the Soviet Union to find truth amid ideology and fear. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/25/2021
  

  The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages

  by Tom Nichols

  "The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s."

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  12/5/2020
  

  Stephen F. Cohen Helped Us Understand the Russian Revolution and Nikolai Bukharin

  by Kevin Murphy

  A fellow historian of Russia and the Soviet Union praises Stephen Cohen's scholarship and willingness to question orthodoxies in examining the internal diversity of revolutionary Communism. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  10/9/2020
  

  The Political History of Concealing Illness, from Brezhnev to Trump

  by Joy Neumeyer

  Like his Communist counterparts, Trump’s predilection for pageantry offers a hollow illusion of vitality while letting potentially fatal problems fester.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/6/2020
  

  Did the US Try to Assassinate Lenin in 1918?

  A new book demonstrates that the United States and western allies attempted to thwart the Bolshevik revolution and actually started the Cold War with an ill-fated 1918 invasion of Russia, but is on more speculative ground tracing an assassination attempt against Lenin to the US.  

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/20/2020
  

  Donald Kendall, Who Built Pepsico into a Soda and Snack-Food Giant, Dies at 99

  The late president of Pepsi-Cola was a leader in bringing American products to the Soviet bloc and Communist China during the cold war and was influential in pushing Richard Nixon to support the CIA's coup against democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende in Chile.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/25/2020
  

  New Video Shows Largest Hydrogen Bomb Ever Exploded

  Although the Soviet Union succeeded in testing a hydrogen bomb more than three times more powerful than the largest U.S.-tested weapon, most military leaders in the cold war sought to make the weapons smaller for strategic reasons. Recently declassified Soviet video shows the test. 

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• SOURCE: BBC
  7/22/2020
  

  Russian Historian Jailed In Controversial Sex Abuse Case

  In May, more than 150 Russians, including artists, actors and writers wrote an open letter to the court in support of the historian, saying they were "sure the accusations… are unfair and should be dismissed by the court".

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  6/2/2020
  

  How History Will Judge the Complicit

  by Anne Appelbaum

  Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

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• SOURCE: Moscow Times
  5/22/2020
  

  Concerns Raised for Detained Gulag Historian Yury Dmitriyev

  U.K. calls for early release after court rejects lawyers’ argument Dmitriyev is at risk of the coronavirus in Karelian detention center.

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• SOURCE: TIME
  4/27/2020
  

  Inside the Mission to Perform Bone-Marrow Transplants on Survivors of the Chernobyl Disaster

  "Nevertheless, the next ten days demonstrated the value of international medical cooperation in moments of crisis, even when politics might make success seem impossible." writes Yair Reisner, an Israeli doctor whose help was requested by Russian officials after the disaster.

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• SOURCE: The American Interest
  4/11/2020
  

  The Forgotten Women of the Gulag

  A new book by Monika Zgustova brings the harrowing, heartbreaking history of the Soviet Gulag’s female prisoners to life.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  3/5/2020
  

  The Truth About Stalin’s Prison Camps

  Vera Golubeva spent more than six years in one of Joseph Stalin’s gulag camps. Her crime? “To this day, I still don’t know,” she says.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/3/2020
  

  Critics of Bernie Sanders’s trip to the Soviet Union are distorting it

  by Yana Skorobogatov, Yakov Feygin and Artemy M. Kalinovsky

  Historians Yana Skorobogatov and Yakov Feygin and Eastern European scholar Artemy M. Kalinovsky contextualize Sanders' opinions on the Soviet Union.

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• 2/9/20
  

  The Cold War New and Old: Architectural Exchanges Beyond the West

  by Łukasz Stanek

  Until today, many urban landscapes in West Africa bear witness to how local authorities and professionals drew on Soviet prefabrication technology, Hungarian and Polish planning methods, Yugoslav and Bulgarian construction materials, Romanian and East German standard designs, and manual laborers from across Eastern Europe.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  2/4/20
  

  We’re Still Living in Stalin’s World

  by Diana Preston

  At the Yalta Conference 75 years ago, the Soviet leader got everything he wanted — and shaped global politics for decades.