Dystopia. Journal of Totalitarian Ideologies and Regimes, vol. I, no. 1-2, 2012
Abstract The study is based on first hand accounts from the archive of the former KGB of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. This data has been disclosed recently in the framework of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Totalitarian Communist Regimes in the Republic of Moldova, created in mid January 2010 (the author was the vice-chairman). According to the new disclosed data, one can see that political repressions did not stop in 1953 when Stalin died, but continued until the mid 1980s during Gorbachev’s Perestroika. The aim of the article is to present separate cases from each post Stalinist decade and try to sketch a typology based on various motivations for repression on the part of the regime, and resistance from the unconscious and conscious critics of the Soviet Communist regime. The basic typology the author formulates implied the existence of two distinct groups of ‘enemies’ of the regime: the first one, called dissenters, being the persons that criticized the regime not straightforwardly as an illegal or unjust political system, but rather protesting against certain elements of it, be they nationality policy, ethnic discrimination or living conditions; the second category of critics of the regimes were called dissidents, defined as persons formulating a more or less coherent protest against the regime and implying a rather conscious stance, more than a spontaneous one compared to the first category. Keywords: KGB, Communism, political repressions, one party rule, party-state,totalitarianism, Stalinism, post Stalinism, nationalism
2012
2022
Abstract The article highlights the impact of Khrushchev’s Thaw on the question of national identity in Soviet Moldavia in the framework of the internal Soviet debates unleashed by the ‘Secret Speech’ and the subsequent Hungarian Revolution. The question of national identity was expressed by two groups, one representing the former GULAG returnees and the other the intellectuals or students socialized in the Soviet milieu. The position of the former was more radical and anti-Soviet, while the latter was milder and respected the status-quo, i.e. the Soviet regime, and only questioned some previously established traditions on what it meant to be Moldavian. Incidentally or not, the former position proved to be more long-lasting and in some way prepared and anticipated the national agenda during Perestroika, in the late 1980s. The question of national identity emerged once again with a comparable fervour in 1968 subsequent to the Prague Spring and Ceaușescu’s refusal to support the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia. In 1956 and 1968, the former Western borderlands – the former Bessarabia, Western Ukraine and the Baltic States – witnessed what one could call a ‘revenge of history’. More exactly, in periods of crisis the links between these territories and the interwar political entities and their traditions were stronger than any time before or afterwards. The specificity of the Moldavian case is that it succeeded in 1955-1957 to resume if only partially the Romanianization process witnessed by the interwar Bessarabia and partially by MASSR. This article is based mainly on archival documents disclosed in the recent years from Chișinău-based depositories. The first set of documents comprises reports from all districts of MSSR sent to Chișinău in the months following the ‘Secret Speech’ and Hungarian Revolution. They are located in the former Archive of the Institute of Party History within the Central Committee of Moldavia, reorganized in 1991 in The Archive of the Social-Political Organizations of the Republic of Moldova. The other set of documents consists of reports of the KGB of MSSR from 1956 and 1957, especially those concerning the attitudes labelled as nationalistic, and are located in the Archive of the Service for Information and Security of the Republic of Moldova, the former KGB of MSSR.
2019, New perspectives in Transnational History of Communism in East Central Europe
The chapter covers the main state terror campaigns initiated by the Soviet regime in the Moldavian SSR starting from the fist year of Soviet occupation of Bessarabia (1940-41) up to 1989. The author uses a wide range of archival unpublished sources as well as published ones both in East and West and tries to put the Moldavian case in a wider Soviet context.
2014, Europe-Asia Studies
Studies in East European Thought
2011
Each volume in the series Annals of Communism will publish selected and previously inaccessible documents from former Soviet state and party archives in a narrative that develops a particular topic in the history of Soviet and international communism. Separate English and Russian editions will be prepared. Russian and Western scholars work together to prepare the documents for each volume. Documents are chosen not for their support of any single interpretation but for their particular historical importance or their general value in deepening understanding and facilitating discussion. The volumes are designed to be useful to students, scholars, and interested general readers.
2015, Cogito: Multidisciplinary Research Journal
The anticommunist opposition did not manifest in a legal environment because, after seizing power, the Stalinist regimes dismantled any form of contestation and any critical group. Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin’s policy, as appearing in the above mentioned secret report, triggered an extensive debate both inside the parties and overall in societies, but especially among the intellectuals. Once the Final Act of the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe is signed in Helsinki in 1975, the criticism towards the communist policy gets a new form. The forms of opposition, dissidence and resistance differed not only from one state to another but also within the very societies in which they appeared. Their evolution during the last communist decades and their categorisation represented a specific debate for the post communist societies of the four states we analysed.
After the Second World War, the Central and East European region was integrated into the Soviet sphere of influence. The active construction of communism across the region during the Stalinist period (1945-1950s) had a number of far-reaching consequences, which arguably transformed the East European region. In the cultural sphere it meant the spreading of Stalin's cult of propaganda, the imposition of Marxist ideology and the persecution of any perceived opposition or alternative world-views. The economic sphere was marked by the liquidation of private property, collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization under the Soviet-style system of central planning. In the political sphere, the shift to a one-party state meant that all non-communist parties and organizations were liquidated and the power of the communist party was secured through mass repression and police surveillance. While the post-Stalinist period led to some liberalization within certain Eastern bloc countries, the limits to reform and relaxation were periodically reinforced, for example in 1956 (Poland and Hungary); 1968 (Czechoslovakia) and 1981 (Poland). The realities of life under communism provoked a multifaceted response among individuals and groups within East European societies between 1945-1989, ranging from support for, complicity with, dissent from and resistance to communism, as people struggled to navigate and negotiate the new parameters of their existence. This conference has two broad aims: (1) to analyse the various methods and experiences of communist control over Eastern Europe and (2) to examine different coping methods and strategies of resistance employed by those who lived under communist rule.
2021, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
2019, Bloomsbury Academic
How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these 'historians' - be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state? To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.
Present-day Moldovan historiography asserts that the main impact of the Prague Spring on Soviet Moldavia was the rise of ethno-national tensions fuelled by Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu’s hard-line stance against Moscow. In this chapter, Caşu refines the conventional view. Based on archival documents, he shows that rural ethnic Romanians overwhelmingly endorsed the reforms in Czechoslovakia and Romania’s anti-invasion position in August 1968. By contrast, Russian or heavily Russified urban inhabitants were more critical of the Czechoslovak reforms and of Romania’s more or less open claim on historical Bessarabia. After 1968 the authorities in Soviet Moldavia felt obliged to embark on a renewed struggle against perceived or real manifestations of Romanian local nationalism, a struggle disguised in the campaign to strengthen Soviet patriotism and ‘socialist internationalism’.
2017, Index on Censorship
2019, The Person and the Challenges
The aim of the article is to present the changes that took place after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 in the Soviet Union and in some countries included in its “external empire”. The “Iron Curtain”, which divided the world in to two parts, began to shift after the Generalissimo’s death and revealed differences in the approach of individual countries to the „newcourse” announced by Stalin’s successors. In some countries, the death of the Kremlin dictator began changes in the policy of the time, in others the methods characteristic of Stalinism were continued, which meant the activity of anall-powerful apparatus of repression seeking real and imagined “enemies”, the central authority of unlimited power with mass terror and striving for total control of citizens and all manifestations of social life. The text presents the most important elements of the policy of the Communist parties in the Soviet Union, GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria in 1953 which were consistent with the process of re-Stalinization, characterized by similarity to governments during the dictator’s life and de-Stalinization, that is, the reversals of methods and tools known in the Stalinism period.
2021, Acta Musei Napocensis. Historica
The present study aims to analyze the relationship between the so‑called ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals (socialized and educated in prestigious cultural groups in the interwar society) and the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, from three perspectives: repression, re‑education, and social reinsertion. The main argument is that all three phases corresponded to Politburo’s political approaches directly related to the evolution of internal or international political events of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sources used are the Securitate files of the persons convicted in the ‘Noica–Pillat trial’ from 1960. The research method is qualitative analysis combining an institutional approach of the Securitate files with a case study. Consequently, the article focuses on the case of Constantin Noica, a prominent Romanian intellectual. He was sentenced to prison in 1960, pardoned in 1964, and later used by the regime in power service. The Securitate used Constantin Noica’s friendship with Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade to attract prestigious intellectuals back to Romania and enhance the nationalist orientation of the regime through philosophy.
ABSTRACT This article analyses the late-Stalinist waves of repression in the Uzbek SSR against the background of the legacy of World War II. Drawing on new archival evidence, the article shows how postwar conditions influenced the Stalin leadership’s decision to unleash repressive campaigns and how the specific circumstances in the Uzbek SSR influenced the course of the campaigns. The article argues, first, that the late-Stalinist purges in the Uzbek SSR were primarily directed by the regime’s desire to regain control over the production base but that the desire to overcome ‘backwardness’ remained a prominent goal. Second, the article argues that repression in the Uzbek SSR can be divided into two phases, underlying an intensifying dynamic due to central leadership intervention in Uzbek affairs. The first phase (1946– 1949) focused primarily on the Uzbek intelligentsia; the second phase (1949–1953) intensified repression through party purges so as to ensure institutional functioning in party and state, which included measures to uproot patronage networks, overcome backward behaviour and establish party discipline.
The security apparatus, the “sword and shield of the party,” was a mainstay of the communist system, which let the totalitarian dictatorship continue for so many years. The communist security apparatus in East Central Europe left tens of thousands dead, millions incarcerated and persecuted in sundry ways. Without studying its history it is impossible to understand not only the past but also the present of this part of Europe. This book is the first attempt at a synthesis of the history of the communist security apparatus in the European countries of the Soviet bloc. Nine authors from six countries present the current state of research and point directions for further investigation.
