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Introduction. The People’s War: Ordinary People and Regime Strategies in a World of Extremes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

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The German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941 brought with it the most extreme conditions of the short twentieth century. Suddenly, the existence of the Soviet state was no longer assured. What the regime did in response tells us much about Stalinism and the Soviet order. In an enormous swathe of territory from the western and southern borderlands of the USSR to the ethnic Russian heartland, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Operation Barbarossa triggered successive regime changes and reversals with which everyone had to reckon. States and armies were hardly the only critically important actors, moreover, as the war unleashed local conflicts and nationalist movements. In sum, aft er years of extreme statism and isolation, millions of Soviet citizens suddenly faced fateful decisions about what to do and how to act.

Type
World War II: Occupation and Liberation
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2016

References

1 These articles were originally presented as papers at a Georgetown University conference on “Occupations and Liberations in World War II,” October 31 and November 1, 2014, co-organized by the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences of the Higher School of Economics and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2 The lyrics to the rousing “Sviashchennaia voina,” written by Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, were published on June 24, 1941.

3 Christopher R., Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

4 Sheila, Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village aft er Collectivization (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

5 Notably, see Robert, Thurston and Bernd, Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana, 2000)Google Scholar.

6 In this sense, it formed part of the “economy of the gift ” described by Jeffrey Brooks in Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000).

7 Terry, Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Michael, Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), 2 Google Scholar; Nigel, Gould-Davies, “Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics During the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, 1 (1999): 90109.Google Scholar

8 For my own approach, see Michael, David-Fox, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: Six Faces of Ideology in the Soviet Context,” chap. 3 of Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, 2015).Google Scholar

9 Alexey, Golubev, “Elemental Materialism: Objectifying Power and Selfhood in the Late USSR, 1961–1991” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2016)Google Scholar.

10 Gerd, Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 19001945 (Munich, 2005).Google Scholar

11 Here see Michael, David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 19211941 (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, chap. 8.