The Construction of Soviet Ethnography and “The Peoples of Siberia”

The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the first time.     

Deep Impact: Robert Goddard and the Soviet ‘Space Fad’ of the 1920s

Using newly available information from Russian archives, this paper explores American rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s relationship to the Soviet space‐flight advocacy community in the 1920s. In post‐Revolutionary Russia, Goddard enjoyed a curious kind of fame. News of his alleged plan to launch a rocket to the Moon permeated widely through a Soviet audience interested in the possibility of space exploration. Goddard’s practical work in developing rockets became a metaphor for the aspirations of the many in Soviet Russia who were unwilling to limit their horizons to theory and prognostication. The new research into Goddard’s relationship to the Soviet space‐flight enthusiast community underscores how international contacts shaped the space advocacy movements of the early twentieth century. The new evidence prompts us to consider an alternative approach to the ‘foundation myth’ of space history involving Tsiolkovskii, Goddard and Oberth, one that privileges an international context instead of the usual multiple national contexts.     

Soviet–Japanese relations and the strategic interests of the Guomindang and the CCP – Chiang Kai‐shek's planning of sanctions against the CCP in 1943

When in 1943 the Guomindang launched its third wave of anti‐communist campaigns, Mao Zedong considered that Chiang Kai‐shek had acted in the belief that Japan would soon invade the Soviet Union. Hitherto, Chinese historians have either ignored Mao's judgment or failed to provide convincing explanations for it. There are two reasons for this attitude: first, historians have failed to appreciate the strategic implications of the relationship between the Soviet Union and Japan for relations between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); and second, relevant evidence regarding the events has not been available in document on Chiang. This essay answers questions raised by both points. Most commentators have claimed that this third anti‐Communist push ended by the middle or late July of 1943. However, Chiang in fact continued to make plans to mop up Shaanbei (the Communist‐controlled northern Shaanxi area) and impose sanctions on the Communists. The formulation, revision and eventual abandonment of Chiang's plans are also addressed in this essay.     

The Impacts of Indonesia's Civil War and the US–Soviet Tug of War over Indonesia on Australia's Diplomacy Towards West New Guinea

From 1958 onwards, the Amsterdam–Jakarta dispute on the determination of sovereignty over the western half of New Guinea began to be affected by the developments of Indonesia's civil war and the tug of war between the US and the Soviet Union over Indonesia. This paper explains how this influenced Australia's WNG diplomacy.

It argues that the major impact of Indonesia's internal war and of the US–Russian tug of war was that they destroyed Australia's assumption that the Dutch would maintain its presence in the Pacific permanently. The second principal impact was that Indonesia's internal war and the Washington–Moscow tug of war urged Canberra to set another new objective in relation to the WNG dispute, and produced a new policy for the achievement of this objective. With the outbreak of an Indonesian–Dutch war over Netherlands New Guinea becoming a real possibility, Australia set the avoidance of the war and the prevention of Indonesia falling into the communist orbit as another new objective. In order to keep a war from occurring in the Southwest Pacific, Canberra developed a policy of appeasing Jakarta.     

From Hope to Escape: Post‐Soviet Russian Memory and Identity

Drawing on letters written by citizens of the USSR to US Congressman James Wright following his 1987 congressional visit and Soviet television appearance as well as follow‐up interviews conducted by this author with many of the same individuals in 2002–2004, this paper will recount the memories of several Muscovites and argue that although the western collective memory of the Cold War is one of victory, the individual accounts of Russians reveals a created memory of the Soviet past which, when confronted with the dire socioeconomic conditions that exist in post‐1991 Russia, leads to a crisis of identity.     

A history of failed innovation: continuous cooking and the Soviet pulp industry, 1940s–1960s

Abstract

In the years before and after the Second World War, chemical and related industries in a variety of countries experienced a surge in innovation and development. As a result, the pulp industry became a space for considerable innovation. In Sweden, Johan Richter developed the Kamyr digester, a pulp cooker that could run continuously and was adopted by industry within a decade. Prior to Richter, Soviet engineer Leonid Zherebov designed a similar cooker. But after 25 years of experiments, Zherebov’s design failed, and Soviet factories began to produce pulp using imported Kamyr digesters. This article examines the history of continuous pulp cooking in the Soviet Union as a means to understand the nature of Russian technological innovation and its failures. The paper contends that his effort failed because of the technological system developed by Soviet forestry – a system characterized by a lack of open communication among its main institutional actors and a scarcity of resources to facilitate innovation.     

Solidarity within limits: Interkit and the evolution of the Soviet Bloc’s Indochina policy, 1967–1985

This article examines how Interkit, the Soviet-controlled ‘anti-China International’, evaluated the development of Sino-Indochinese relations, and which contribution the Vietnamese and Laotian delegations made to the forum’s meetings. It investigates how the various shifts in Sino-Soviet and Soviet-US relations enhanced or reduced Vietnam’s relative importance in Soviet strategy. It describes how the Kremlin sought to dissuade its East European satellites from responding to Beijing’s overtures by presenting the Sino-Vietnamese conflict as evidence of China’s belligerence, and examines the ideological linkage between Soviet superpower hegemony over Eastern Europe and Vietnamese regional hegemony over Indochina.     

‘Slowing down the going-away process’ — Tom Stoppard and Soviet Dissent

Tom Stoppard is a playwright most noted for his ferocious wordplay and playful approach to reality. In the 1970s and 1980s, his concern for like-minded prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc informed his activism on their behalf, utilising his public profile in an attempt to reposition their plight in the West. Stoppard’s activism was largely informed by his involvement with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to publicise human rights violations in the Soviet Union, who provided him with the most up to date information on these abuses, and gave him access to dissidents. This article explores Stoppard’s activism on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, highlighting the impact that these organisations had on his activism. Through an assessment of Stoppard’s efforts, it highlights the important role that NGOs and celebrity politics played during the cold war.