Soviet elites and European integration: from Stalin to Gorbachev

This article argues that, like the liberalising “Great Reforms” of Russia in the mid-19th century, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika of the late 20th century was propelled as much by reformist intellectuals' Europe-inspired visions of a more humane society as it was by military-economic crisis. Over the post-Stalin decades, a new policy-academic elite – economists, philosophers, scientists and writers – viewed in the apparent success of East European reforms a model of “socialism with a human face” for their country's eventual reintegration into a “common European home.” Yet their understanding of European integration was too superficial, and their appreciation of communist hard-liners' resistance too belated, to carry their reforms to successful completion. This article also holds that Russian reformers' naiveté was compounded by Western leaders' selfishness and short-sightedness. The latter clung to Cold War beliefs that the Soviet system could not produce a genuine reformist movement. When Gorbachev came to power, his perestroika was considered merely a “ruse,” its ideas of “new thinking” ridiculed, and ultimately only the “shock therapy” of Boris Yeltsin merited significant Western aid despite its broad incompetence and vast corruption. The combined Western-Russian failures in 1990s efforts toward rapid marketisation and integration proved even more damaging than those of the 1980s due to their broad discrediting of Western liberal democracy.     

Sport and society in Italy today

Summary

In ‘Itinerary’ Patrick McCarthy provides an introduction to the four articles that examine the connections between sport, politics, business and contemporary culture in Italy. Noting that mass participation in sport has been closely related to modernization, McCarthy argues that the forms of contemporary mass sport reflect the particular cultural, political and economic conditions of each European society. In Italy these made soccer and cycling the most popular mass sports by 1945.

Patrizia Dogliani’s article ‘Sport and Fascism’ examines the development of mass sport in Italy from the late nineteenth century, showing the critical role played by the Fascist regime, which rapidly expanded public sports facilities while the language of politics and combat permeated the vocabulary of sport in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially the emphasis was on international competition as a symbol of national virility, but following the success of Germany and the USA in the 1936 Olympics the regime’s search for consensus placed new emphasis on recreational aspects. The institutional and administrative organization of sport established in the 1930s remained in place in Italy, however, until more recendy.

In ‘Itinerary 2’ McCarthy examines the roles of the boxer Carnera from Friuli and the racing driver Tazio Nuvolari as sporting heroes of Mussolini’s Italy and in ‘Itinerary 3’ shows how the struggles between Catholic Italy and Communist Italy were personified in the rivalry between the cyclists Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi in the post-war period.

In ‘Itinerary 4’ he asks why soccer had by the 1970s overtaken cycling as Italy’s most popular sport. That theme is examined in greater detail by Nicola Porro and Pippa Russo, whose article reconstructs the ‘hybridization of sport, mass media and politics’ in Italy in the 1990s. Its central focus is Silvio Berlusconi, the self-made media tycoon who founded Fininvest in the 1970s, acquired AC Milan in 1986, and by 1994 controlled a media empire that enabled him to found a new political party (Forza Italia) and become Italy’s Prime Minister albeit for less than a year. Porro and Russo examine the ways in which Berlusconi’s roles in the world of the media and professional soccer have changed both Italian politics and Italian sport.

In ‘Itinerary 5’ McCarthy sets the example of Berlusconi in the context of the integration of soccer and mass media, the commercialization and politicization of sport at a global level in the last decade. These issues are developed in greater detail in Emanuela Poli’s article, ‘The revolution in the televised soccer market’, which emphasizes the critical role that has been played by soccer and soccer clubs in the development of the new media empires based on digital pay-per-view TV and the sale of sporting events in the 1990s. This has left control of the sport (in terms of who can watch and when) in the hands of major international communications moguls like Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch.

‘Itinerary 6’ links the fragmentation of collective myths like the national soccer championships to the decline of the nation state, and surveys the situation of other sports in Italy (the Americas Cup, skiing, rugby football. Formula 1 motor racing and the gymnasium). The latter is the subject of the final article by Roberta Sassatelli on ‘The commercialization of discipline: keep-fit culture and its values’ which explores the social and cultural meanings attached to the growing vogue for fitness clubs and the shaping of the ideal body in contemporary Italy.     

Interrepublic Trade in the Former Soviet Union: Structure and Implications

A senior CIA economist presents and analyzes the structure and implications of hitherto unpublished 1990 data on interrepublic trade, recently available from sources identified with the former Goskomstat SSSR. The study, unique in its access to statistical data of Soviet origin affording detailed comparisons of trade with indigenous sectoral detail, reveals advantages and dependencies inherent in the trade structures of each of the former Soviet republics. Analysis of the context in which interrepublican trade flows (valued in rubles and dollars) occurred highlights the relationship between drastic declines in industrial output and trade among the newly independent states in the 1990s. 9 figures, 18 tables, 12 references.     

Civil society,political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia

This paper questions under what conditions the social foundation necessary for the construction and sustenance of civil society are present in post-colonial social formations, and the extent to which there has been a need to develop concessionary politics to maintain a project of rule. It utilizes Partha Chatterjee's usage of Gramsci's political society to understand how Cambodia's ILO-led garment factory monitoring regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of worker citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for their well being. I argue that the hegemonic project is fraught by virtue of the fact that consent-seeking forms of regulation, which aim to prevent strikes through trade union membership and tripartitism, have reached their limit and spilled over and into a disaggregated, messier terrain of struggles akin to political society. To develop the argument that workers' politics cannot be expressed in state-civil society relations, I present case studies of two forms of protest. The first form is distinguished by mass faintings, which I characterize as ‘visceral protest’ against the terms of workers' insertion into industrial capitalism. The second is large-scale, worker-led strikes that signal a ‘politics of social disorder’ is emerging, characterized by extra-legal, disruptive, and sometimes violent protest. The paper calls for a re-politicization of labor, and research attuned to workers' ambitions that cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within state-civil society relations.     

Land Evaluation and Regional Pricing in the Soviet Union

The author examines the use of the Lorenz curve and the Florence method for measuring the degree of spatial concentration of industry in a given area, and then develops an index of his own, based on ratio of the industrial output, value of plant, and industrial employment per unit area in a region to the industrial output, value of plant, and industrial employment per unit area in the country (or larger regional entity) as a whole. Findings for the major economic regions and middle-level regions (oblasts, krays, ASSRs) of the RSFSR are shown in the form of tables, graphs and map. A pronounced spread in levels of concentration is found between the European and Asian portions of the RSFSR, with concentration levels in the Central Russian region (at one extreme) and the Soviet Far East (at the other extreme) differing by a factor of 56.     

The Soviet Union and Mosaddeq: A Research Note

Although it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union did not play a significant role in the events leading to the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, little has been written about how the Soviets perceived the Iranian leader and the movement he inspired. This article argues that Soviet leaders generally saw Mosaddeq as weak and ill-disposed towards the Soviet Union. The Soviet failure to secure an oil concession in Iran in 1946 and general conservatism about anti-colonial movements during the late Stalin period conditioned their assessment of Mosaddeq's premiership. After Soviet policy towards the Third World changed in the mid-1950s, Mosaddeq's movement was reinterpreted as a genuine “struggle of national liberation.”     

蒋经国留学苏联述论

蒋经国在留学苏联期间,受到苏共和斯大林的重视,被吸收为苏共党员并送入高级军事院校深造,其命运随中国革命形势和中苏关系的变化而动荡起伏,他留苏12载,深入苏联政治和社会生活,历经肃托、农业集体化、肃反等各种运动,目睹苏联的种种弊端,对苏联从向往到怀疑,最终彻底背离。苏联通过蒋经国影响蒋介石,使中苏关系形成有利于苏联态势的期冀最终没有实现。     

Personal Acts with Public Meanings: Suicides by Soviet Women Teachers in the Early Stalin Era

During the first stage of the Stalin era, suicides by Soviet women teachers revealed the essential ambiguity of a self–destructive act, the uncertain identity of women as public activists, and the difficult position of teachers at a time of intense political conflict. Examining eight women teachers who killed themselves in the period 1928 to 1931, this study argues that this assertion of self–control through self–destruction was also a surrender to others, including the actors and structures whose domination originally contributed to suicidal behaviours. This study thus describes both limited opportunities for and considerable restraints upon women teachers in the Stalinist context.