The “New Thinking,” a complete recasting of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev, paradoxically precipitated the fall of the regime. A generation of reformers who cut their intellectual teeth in the 1950s were the source of the doctrine.
During the Soviet era, October 1917 was the central political and cultural reference. One hundred years later, Russian society is still deeply divided over its past. Will the centenary of the Revolution be the great moment of national reconciliation the Russian power wants it to be?
In Russia, the government’s propaganda machine is not limited to the political sphere. In rewriting the country’s history, it is promoting “the decay of rationality and the de-installation of a scientific worldview”. Historian Ekaterina Pravilova addresses the effects of this crisis of knowledge for Russia’s intelligentsia and academic community.
How can a state expect its borders to be respected and at the same time deny the existence of borders to spread revolution? Historian Sabine Dullin’s unique reconstruction of Soviet political imagination gives provocative answers to this apparent paradox. Her new way of looking at frontiers also has tremendous relevance to explain Russia’s border politics of today.
With the publication of a book on the environmental history of Russia, Étienne Forestier-Peyrat analyses the link between politics and environment in Russian and Soviet history, from the Czarist campaigns to expand territories to the current and highly controversial construction of the Sochi Olympic Village.
Film censorship in post-Stalin Russia was neither rational, nor a product of ideology. As, historian Martine Godet convincingly shows, it was rather the result of a fluid and unpredictable process, where status and stratagems played a key role.
