Stalinist political spectacle and the defeat of the opposition: The Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1927

The Fifteenth Party Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) took place in December 1927. It brought to an end the inner-Party struggle of the Soviet Communist Party by confirming the expulsion of Leon Trotsky, Gregorii Zinoviev and other oppositionists from Party and government posts. The Fifteenth Party Congress marked the domination of Iosif Stalin and his allies over the whole Party and the beginning of Stalinist politics which flourished in the following decades. Despite extensive scholarly interest in this crucial Party congress in the history of the early Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, little has been studied on the organisational aspect of the Fifteenth Congress. This article examines the process of establishing the organisational and institutional mechanisms ahead of the Fifteenth Congress, which enabled Stalin and the Central Committee to unanimously affirm the correctness of the Party line. It also explores how Stalin attained legitimacy as the Party leader during the pre-Fifteenth Congress discussion and how it was presented at the Fifteenth Congress. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how the ‘memory’ of the Fifteenth Congress was constructed and how the Party leaders institutionalised the meaning of the Fifteenth Congress. Through these examinations, this article will shed fresh light on the Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and will contribute to the study of the rise of Stalinism.     

Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women‐Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia

Over the course of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945, over 800,000 Soviet women volunteered to the front and served in the field army. Among them were thousands of snipers, riflewomen, machine‐gunners and mortar women. Thousands of women were trained to serve as commanders and commissars of rifle, machine‐gun and mortar subdivisions. Women also mastered fighter planes, dive bombers and night bombers as well as light and heavy tanks. I pursue three questions in the article: how did this women's entitlement to fighting become thinkable in the first place, acceptable in the second, and thirdly, realisable in Soviet society? I argue that the conceivability of women's compatibility with combat, war and violence was a product of the radical undoing of traditional gender differences that Stalinist society underwent in the 1930s. By the late 1930s, combat duty in wartime became an acknowledged option for women in Stalinist political culture. The construction of alternative gender personalities enjoyed both public articulation in press and military expert approval. The alternative femininity encompassed and redefined the traditionally incompatible qualities: maternal love and military violence, feminine charm.     

The War on Terror from the Perspective of Indonesia and Saudi Arabia

This article examines the perspective of two major Islamic nations—Saudi Arabia and Indonesia—toward the United States' War on terror and how this war shaped and influenced the behavior of the two Islamic governments toward domestic challenges and their partnership with the United States, as they have declared their support of the United States. Indeed the war against terror has developed several security concerns for both Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. However, each state has followed different methods to fight Islamic radical movements as well as a different framework of partnership with the United States on its war against terrorism.