The Second Soviet Republic

In terms of economic potential and political future, the Ukraine was second only to Russia itself among the fifteen Soviet Republics that comprised the USSR after World War II. Although Ukraine was dependent upon the dictates of Moscow, there was much evidence to support the thesis that the spirit of the Ukrainian nationalism had survived and flourished under the weight of Soviet nationality policy. Despite liquidating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, the attempt to eliminate the Ukrainian language and its rich literary heritage, and bombarded by mass propoganda aimed at the schools, the Ukrainian people continued clinging to their national identity against these odds. In this analysis of the political and social structure of the Ukraine since World War II, Dr. Bilinsky shows that the methods designed to integrate the Ukraine in the USSR have produced factors which contributed to rather than diminished Ukrainian national consciousness. This book is about the Ukraine, but in a larger sense it is a systematic, comprehensive, and revealing ctitique of the Soviet policies and techniques employed in holding together the widely differing cultural, linguistic, and geographical segments of the world's largest state.

Second Secretary of the Central Committee of a Soviet republic does not sound a very important position, but as this book shows it was an extremely important role, one that helped hold the Soviet Union together and helped to keep it going for so long. The key was that Second Secretaries were both members of a Soviet republic’s ruling body and at the same time members of the All-Union ruling elite - they were often characterised as Moscow’s governor generals. This book examines how the position of Second Secretary was established by Khrushchev in the 1950s, explores how it took on increasingly important political functions representing Moscow’s interests in the republics and the republics’ interests in Moscow, and discusses how the conflicts, inherent in the role, developed. The book also provides biographical details of the people who held the position and argues that the role was extremely effective in managing what could otherwise have been very difficult relationships between centre and periphery.

This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press.

Historians have heatedly debated the Soviet role in the origins of the Second World War for more than 50 years. At the centre of these controversies stands the question of Soviet relations with Nazi Germany and the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. Drawing on a wealth of new material from the Soviet Archives, this detailed and original study analyses Moscow's response to the rise of Hitler, explains the origins of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and charts the road to Operation Barbarossa and the disaster of the surprise German attack on the USSR in June 1941.

Excerpt from The Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia: Its Rise and Organisation The present pamphlet is of exceptional interest, being from the pen of a man who was a member of the French military mission during the time Russia was at war, and was afterwards employed by the French Government as its official agent in its dealings with the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Government. In this latter capacity he had numerous opportunities of coming into close contact with various leaders of New Russia, and conceived a deep sympathy for them and their cause. He, therefore, became a strong opponent of the idea of Allied intervention, and with a view to counteracting it wrote, in the summer of last year, a number of private letters to influential politicians in France, including Albert Thomas and Jean Longuet, describing the real condition of affairs in Russia, as distinguished from the official reports issued to the French Press, and the nefarious intrigues of the agents of the Allied Governments. The existence of these letters was not even suspected in Russia until August, 1918, when copies of them were found in the course of a search made by the authorities at the headquarters of the French Military Mission at Moscow. Some of them were immediately made public, and a full collection of them was recently published at Berne. Only one letter giving a survey of the internal organisation of the Soviet Republic and of its foreign policy failed to reach the Berne publishers in time, and it is this letter - or, rather, that part of it which deals with the internal organisation under the Soviet regime - which is now offered to the public in an English translation. The value of the information which it contains is naturally enhanced by the personality of its author, who, starting out as a Saul gradually became a Paul. In fact, since that time Jacques Sadoul openly went over to the Bolshevik side and became the head of the French-speaking section of the Russian Communist Party, in which capacity he played a prominent part in the revolt of the French armed forces at Odessa. At an early date the second part of the letter will be published. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

An influential Soviet sociologist analyzes the social and economic straits of the country, the current reform policies, and the effect restructuring would have on various segments of the population. She argues for political democratization as the only guarantee of reform. Cloth edition (unseen), $35. Translated from the Russian, and most of the sources cited are in Russian. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR