Anti-Governmental Opposition under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, 1953-1983.
This is a book about the unknown side of the Soviet "underground", the various mass or individual forms of expressing discontent with the Soviet power. The documents in the volume include secret reports from the Soviet militia about "anti-Soviet acts" committed on the territory of the Soviet Union, materials from investigations and law suits against "enemies of the Soviet state". The archival materials give an idea of the popular oppositional ideologies of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev period. They illustrate the peculiar type of political culture and oppositional struggle, presenting samples of oppositional literary and scholarly works, political programs of oppositional groups, as well as psychological portraits of Soviet nonconformists.

Editors: John Bushnell, Northwestern University; V. A. Kozlov, GARF Deputy Director; S. V. Mironenko, Director, GARF

Principal archive: GARF


 

The Katyn Massacre.
This volume investigates the massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers by Soviet NKVD execution squads in the spring of 1940 in the forest of Katyn and other locations. It is a project of great importance both because of the magnitude of the crime committed and its elaborate fifty-year cover-up by the Soviet authorities. In 1989 Gorbachev for the first time revealed the existence of documents that prove Soviet responsibility for the crime; and in 1990 he delivered to the Polish government a set of such documents. Since that time a commission of Polish and Russian researchers has collected tens of thousands of relevant documents. This vast undertaking will produce not only full documentation and proof of Soviet responsibility, which has already been acknowledged, but also a picture of the entire system—political, military, bureaucratic—that operated to produce this tragedy. Yale University Press intends to condense the findings of the Polish and Russian research teams into one volume of approximately 400 printed pages, which will include a representative selection of documents along with a narrative text written by an American scholar working with Russian and Polish colleagues.

Editors: Anna M. Cienciala, University of Kansas; Natalia S. Lebedeva, Russian Academy of Sciences, author of Katyn’: Prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva (Katyn: A crime against humanity) (Moscow: Progress–Kul’tura, 1994); Woyciech Materski, Institute of Political Studies, Wasaw.

Principal archives: the State Archival Service of Russia (ROSARKHIV); KGB, Military Intelligence (GRU), Presidential Archive, and numerous regional archives.


 

 

Voice of the People: Peasants, Workers, and the Soviet State, 1918-1932.
This collection of letters will depict the experiences and changing attitudes of the lower classes in the Soviet Union and thereby help evaluate the true effectiveness of the Bolshevik message.

Editors: Jeffrey Burds, Northeastern University; Andrei K. Sokolov, Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences

Principal Archive: RGAE
Subsidiary Archive: State Historical Archive of the City of Moscow


 

 

 

 

 

The Assassination of Sergei Kirov and the Great Terror.
This volume will investigate the fifty-year mystery of the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular first secretary of the Leningrad Party Committee, on 1 December 1934. It will attempt to establish for the first time the actual role played by Stalin in the assassination, the intraparty conflicts of the time, the way the assassination served to catalyze the Great Terror of the 1930s and its exploitation by Soviet authorities over the next fifty years as a tool of propaganda and disinformation. The volume will include materials never before researched—either by the Khrushchev or the Gorbachev commissions—from the KGB archives. It will reproduce stenographic records of interrogations and other official documents produced as a result of the investigations into the assassination of Kirov, ranging from the immediate investigation in the 1930s to the Khrushchev (1950s) and Gorbachev (late 1980s-1990s) investigations, and will include letters and telegrams from Stalin’s personal secretariat.

Editors: Vladimir P. Naumov, historian, head of The Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression; Steven Miner, Ohio University.

Principal archive: Center for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD)


 

 

The Stalin Terror (The Shvernik Report).
Based on the 1963 "Report on Violations of Legality in the Period of the Stalin Personality Cult," a hitherto-secret report of the so-called Shvernik Commission, the commission set up by the Central Committee Presidium under Khrushchev and headed by N. M. Shvernik, chairman of the Party Control Commission, charged with investigating illegal political repressions of the 1930s and 1940s. The documents cover a series of political trials beginning immediately upon the murder of Sergei Kirov in December of 1934 and lasting until the end of the 1930s, the period often termed the Great Terror. They provide unprecedented detail supporting a view of Stalin as, in the words of the American editor Robert C. Tucker, the demiurge, the "initiator, organizer and even micro-manager" of the terror process whose precipitating event was the Kirov murder. The document itself, along with the history of the Shvernik Commission, reveals Krushchev’s tactics and intentions in his own struggle for autocratic power.

Editors: American editor to be announced; Vladimir P. Naumov, historian, head of The Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression

Principal archive: Center for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD)


 

 

Russian Revolution (2 volumes)

Vol. 1.    Voices of Revolution, 1917
At the center of this book are the voices of ordinary Russians--urban workers, peasants, and soldiers--expressing their ideals, discontents, and values amidst the revolutionary upheavals in Russia from February 1917 to January 1918.  Designed with classroom use and general readers especially in mind, the collection presents a variety of individual letters and collective appeals in which ordinary Russians speak of what the revolution meant to them. These texts reveal not only the range of popular political opinion in Russia during the revolution, but also the judgments, ideals, values, and emotions that were essential to how people understood and judged the revolution. The book includes an introductory discussion of popular language in the revolution and background histories of the revolution based on the latest scholarship.

Editor: Mark Steinberg, University of Illinois

Vol. 2.    The Russian Revolution, 1917-1918.
This volume presents new archival materials, providing a multifaceted picture of the political, social, and cultural history of the revolutions of 1917 and the first year of Soviet power. The documents emphasize the viewpoints and experiences of key political leaders, as well as of less-known activists and ordinary people, thus connecting the realms of high politics and daily life. The material illuminates the struggle for power—defining it broadly to encompass not only state power but also local struggles for social dominance.

Editors: Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University; G. Z. Ioffe, Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences

Principal archives: GARF, RGASPI


 

 

The Church, the People, and the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932.
This volume will offer the first reliable account of religious repression in the early Soviet era. It will include material from the archive of Patriarch Tikhon, who called for a holy war against the Bolsheviks, as well as from the archive of Yemelian Yaroslavsky, leader of the Bolshevik cultural campaign against religion. The book will provide documentary evidence of the closure of churches, confiscations of church property, peasant resistance to church closures, and the liquidation of priests and believers.

Editors: Gregory Freeze, Brandeis University; Leonid Vaintraub, archivist of the Russian Orthodox Church

Principal Archive (tentatively): GARF and its branch in St. Petersburg
Subsidiary Archive: RGASPI


 

 

 

 

Soviet Power and Culture, 1917-1953.
This study is based on a rich, varied and fascinating series of archival documents that throw new light on the roles of the Soviet leadership, Stalin and the secret police in the evolution and management of Soviet culture. The collection deals with all areas of the arts: literature, theater, film painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance and opera, and such prominent figures as Pasternak, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, Gorky, Babel, Akhmatova, Fadeev and many others. The sources include state decrees on cultural issues, letters exchanged between intellectuals and Stalin, petitions from individual writers and artists, reports of discussions among members of the Politburo regarding important decisions and the ensuing official resolutions, transcripts of discussions that particular artists or writers had with Stalin and his associates, etc. Particularly interesting are the reports of the secret police to the Kremlin leadership about attitudes among intellectuals (based on informants' revelations), much of which is presented in direct quotation.

Editors: Katerina Clark, Yale University; Evgeny Dobrenko, Nottingham University; Andrei N. Artizov, Rosarkhiv; Oleg V. Naumov, RGASPI.

Principal archive: RGASPI

Subsidiary archives: APRF, TsA FSB, RGALI


 

 

 

 

The Siege of Leningrad
This study will revisit one of the greatest epic struggles for survival in history. The authors gained access to and studied most extant materials on the siege from state, party, military and NKVD archives. The result is the most complete and comprehensive account of the blockade that encompasses both the activities of the political and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders. Among the materials are the top-secret communiqués between Leningrad's political and military leaders and Stalin and other members of the State Defense Council in the Kremlin, the NKVD documents elucidating the structure and activities of the secret police in Leningrad, unpublished memoirs and diaries, and NKVD surveys of popular attitudes.

American editor: Richard Bidlack, Washington and Lee University; Russian editor: Nikita Lomagin.


 

 

 

 

Yale Companion to Soviet History and Politics

Editors: Sean McMeekin; Aleksander Chubaryan, Director, Institute of General History, Moscow

 

 

 

 

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