This special issue of Cahiers du Monde russe aims to, albeit in a partial way, present the new approaches to the Soviet Union at war that have developed over the last twenty years thanks to newly available sources. Numerous works on the period cover unchartered territory in areas as diverse as civilians in the war, frontoviki profiles, representations of the conflict, the latter’s impact on the Soviet system, relationships between state and society, or even between men and women. However, the..

Blum, Alain

Gousseff, Catherine

Graziosi, Andrea

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 Cahiers du monde russe
Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États
indépendants 
52/2-3 | 2011
L’URSS et la Seconde Guerre mondiale
Preface
Préface
Alain Blum, Catherine Gousseff and Andrea Graziosi
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/7530
ISSN: 1777-5388
Publisher
Éditions de l’EHESS
Printed version
Date of publication: 15 November 2011
Number of pages: 199-204
ISBN: 978-2-7132-2352-5
ISSN: 1252-6576
 
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© École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Paris
2012
Preface
Préface
Alain Blum, Catherine Gousseff and Andrea Graziosi
1 This special issue of Cahiers du Monde russe aims to, albeit in a partial way, present the new
approaches to the Soviet Union at war that have developed over the last twenty years
thanks to newly available sources.  Numerous works on the period cover unchartered
territory in areas as diverse as civilians in the war, frontoviki profiles, representations of
the conflict, the latter’s impact on the Soviet system, relationships between state and
society, or even between men and women. However, these approaches, for the most part
highly specialized, have not been put into perspective in such a way as to give a new
assessment of World War II in the Soviet Union.
2 With that  ambition in mind,  we organized a conference in Paris  between May 5 and
May 7,  2011.  The conference aimed to present  the current  state of  research through
investigations on the war itself,  its outset, and its consequences on “high Stalinism.”1
Needless to say, the success of the call for papers2 attests of the significance of these
research fields for international historians.  Our selection was limited to a very small
number  of  contributions.  This  entailed  the  rejection  of  otherwise  highly  relevant
approaches such as regional studies dealing with the rear areas or territories of the front.
Similarly, certain highly researched topics such as remembrance or memorial sites had to
be ignored so that the program could stay within the boundaries of the topic.
3 The issue presents the proceedings of the conference. However, the articles reflect only
part  of  the  numerous  themes  that  were  actually  discussed.  They  are  arranged  both
thematically and chronologically.
4 By way of foreword, we are using Oleg Khlevniuk’s contribution, a survey of the evolution
of Stalinist dictatorship during the conflict. Khlevniuk’s description of the main archival
funds  of  the  period,  combined with  the  presentation of  the  great  tendencies  in  the
structural reorganization of power, clarifies Stalin’s role and importance during the war,
the  role  played  by  his  entourage  in  the  transformation  of  the  country’s  political
administration and the transition toward wartime organization. The internal and
external  consequences  of  the  Molotov-Ribbentrop  pact,  the  forms  taken  by  the
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Cahiers du monde russe, 52/2-3 | 2011
1
collaboration between the two temporary allies,  the scenarios underlying the various
territorial annexations and the place of nationality policy in the development of Stalin’s
policy in the early stages of the conflict – these and other topics have been revisited in
the  study  of  the  two  years  preceding  the  German  invasion  of  the  Soviet  Union.
Sabine Dullin and Serhii Plokhy reinterpret the orientations of Stalin’s policy between
1939  and  1941  by  studying  a  combination  of  different  interpretation  and  action
paradigms, and the centrality of the nationality question. These two contributions show
how instrumental nationality policy was in fashioning the Soviet leaders’ representations
and how it influenced their behavior both at home and abroad, determining numerous
practices in the context of an imminent war. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa makes the link between
the prewar and wartime periods by studying the poorly known relations between the
Soviet  Union and Japan.  Last,  David Wolff  addresses  the  Soviet  Union’s  international
policy in the immediate aftermath of the war in a study of Soviet expansionist plans and
realizations. The author describes Stalin’s redrawing of the country’s western and eastern
borders in order to show the different strategic interests defended by Stalin and his role
in fanning conflicts related to territory delimitation, particularly in Central Europe. 
5 In the second part of the volume, wartime government practices are studied through
highly  diversified  approaches.  In  a  study  of  the  propaganda  deployed  in  the  newly
annexed western territories, Serhii Plokhy shows how the Soviet state used the specious
argument of the role of nationalities in the construction of the country and the national
liberation question to justify its current expansion. This most singular period preceding
the invasion of western territories by the Wehrmacht harbingered the various scenarios
of the Soviet Union at war. In recent decades, historiography has focused on how the
conflict progressed in occupied regions, and has shed light on numerous hitherto unclear
areas ranging from patterns of resistance and collaboration to everyday life under the
occupation. These new approaches have deeply renewed our understanding of the events
of the period, particularly the Holocaust on the Eastern Front. Parallel to these significant
advances in the history of German-occupied territories are numerous works addressing
changes in Soviet governance in the rear.  They are given precedence in this volume.
Yoram Gorlizki presents these mutations through a study of the implementation of the
“extraordinary administration system” and its incidence on the behavior of local party
committees – from political competition on the local scale to the way in which obkomy
dealt with new economic governance tasks. Gorlizki argues that if party committees first
offered fiefdom-like resistance to the agents of the extraordinary administration system,
their failure in managing the economic development led to their relegation to a purely
ideological role at the end of the war. Vanessa Voisin examines the mutations that took
place inside the party from a different angle. She proposes a rereading of the loyalty
criteria  applied  during  the  Kalinin  party  purges  subsequent  to  the  liberation  of  the
region. The lack of activists notwithstanding, the purge was a priority, and its conduct
appealed  to  different  sets  of  values.  Even  though  the  applied  criteria  revived  an
archetypal conception of the bolshevik activist, the modes of verification of individual
loyalty underwent drastic changes, turning into a real scrutiny of conscience and leading
to contradictory results in a region profoundly destabilized at the end of the war. 
6 Sofiia Grachova addresses the specificities of wartime government practices by studying
the policy of legal proceedings and its evolution as concerns inquiries into propaganda
and counterrevolutionary agitation charges. This investigation helps us understand both
the significant increase of criticism against the regime during the first two years of the
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Cahiers du monde russe, 52/2-3 | 2011
2
war and the dilemma that the judiciary was facing, caught between severe repression and
the need to preserve a gravely affected society, from the rear areas to the front.
7 Last, Eren Murat Tasar addresses the question of the numerous expectations that the end
of the war raised in the Soviet population by studying the encounter of Islam and Soviet
patriotism. The populations of Kyrgyzstan interpreted the various measures taken during
the war as a favorable context for a new adaptation of Islam to the Soviet system. The
author examines these expectations and what fostered them, and reaches a more general
conclusion about the “confiscated victory” and the return to a social and political control
that the war had helped loosen.
8 War violence – ranging from the sudden upheavals suffered by society to mass crimes – is
one  of  the  most  important  fields  of  research  on  the  period  and  is  part  of  a  larger
historical investigation running across research on Europe and the world at war. This
third thematic set opens with Oleg Budnitskii’s essay on the changes that took place in
the relationships between men and women as they were perceived by combatants and
described  in  their  diaries.  These  entries  reveal  an  extraordinary  transformation  in
women’s sexual life akin to liberation at times or to a new form of slavery, particularly in
the case of those who joined the frontoviki. Despite the depth of women’s involvement at
the  front,  their  presence  by  the  side  of  male  combatants  has  received  little  if  any,
recognition,  and  their  experience  may  have  jeopardized  their  postwar  social
reintegration. Mie Nakachi continues the reflection on the changes that took place in
gender relations by focusing on the role of the war in the mutations that took place
within the family.
9 Soviet  legal  sources have long remained unexplored terrain,  being considered as  the
articulation of a totalitarian system producing a political and mainly imaginary legalist
discourse. This mistrust was due to a genuine ignorance of their importance and of the
tensions and contradictions that run through them. Their use has considerably increased
in the last years, as Voisin’s and Grachova’s contributions demonstrate. Nathalie Moine’s
analysis of the mass arson of villages by the German occupant, which figures among war
crimes,  deeply  questions  the  contribution  of  legal  sources.  Her  exploration  of  the
Extraordinary State Commission’s communiqués and postwar trials archives presents a
reflection  on  sources  and  the  phenomenon under  study,  whose  magnitude  has  long
remained  unknown.  In  the  process,  her  study  evaluates  the  patterns  and  levels  of
violence, which varied in intensity from one region to another, and left some regions –
Bielorussia, for instance – particularly devastated.
10 The gathering and analysis of actors’ or victims’ testimonies is one of the new approaches
to the period that has remarkably developed over the last decades. Alexander Von Plato’s
collection of narratives on forced labor throughout Europe is particularly representative
of this current.3 In the results of a series of interviews conducted in the Donbass region in
Ukraine, Tanja Penter presents the diversity of personal experiences in a population that
has partly been deported to Germany, known the occupation of the region, witnessed the
Holocaust and/or antipartisan repression, and has long been branded for having been in
occupied territory, regardless of what individual behaviors may have been during the
war.
11 This issue naturally presents a very small facet of a deeply changing field. Let us conclude
on what is missing. Our call for papers mentioned several topics which have not elicited
proposals and are still little or poorly understood.
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3
12 A detailed study of how Soviet society lived through the war in the rear and on the front
would  allow  us  better  to  appreciate  and  understand  the  role  of  the  conflict  in  the
reconfiguration of the Soviet Union and the characterization of “high Stalinism.” There
still remain numerous questions on the immediate aftermath of the war – as for instance,
the re-Sovietization of western territories, which was in some way a “war after the war.”
The dramatic situation of a victorious country that was nonetheless terribly bruised and
battered after years of war, with 25 million homeless and 27 million casualties, deserves
careful  scrutiny.  The magnitude of  the disaster  was such that  the way in which the
society  recovered,  the  sacrifices  to  which  it  had  to  consent  and  the  ordeals  that  it
suffered, as for instance the 1946 famine, still remain an enigma.
13 Scholars still have difficulty evaluating the unprecedented population movements that
followed  the  war  –  re-evacuations  from  the  rear  areas;  massive  repatriations  of
Ostarbeiter, prisoners of war, and demobilized soldiers in western territories; transfers of
nationalities as part of the redefinition of borders; the return of Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust; and the handling of refugees. To this formidable “men moving,” one must add
the new deportations of ethnic groups. What changes did the war effect on the “Gulag”
and, more generally, the Soviet “world of concentration camps?”
14 This  conclusion  intends  to  show  how  numerous  and  fascinating  the  newly  opened
avenues of research are,  and how pressing the need to gather historians working on
different sources, particularly German and Soviet ones. This issue marks a step forward in
this renewal and is an invitation to pursue innovative research.
15 Last, we cannot conclude without including Marc Ferro’s introductory talk. Ferro is one of
the foremost specialists of World War II and the Soviet Union. His work has left a deep
impact on the research focusing on the areas where these two important fields meet. We
are happy to present the spontaneous testimony of a major historian who has greatly
inspired our research on twentieth‑century wars.
NOTES
1. The program is available on http://cercec.ehess.fr/document.php?id=1540. The members of
the  conference’s  scientific  committee  were  Stéphane  Audoin-Rouzeau,  Alain  Blum,  Dietrich
Beyrau,  Sabine  Dullin,  Catherine  Gousseff,  Andrea  Graziosi,  Christian  Ingrao,  Oleg Khlevniuk,
Mark Kramer, Nathalie Moine, Jean-Christophe Romer, Andrei Sorokin, Alexander Vatlin, David
Wolff.  Funding for this conference was made possible by grants from the French Embassy in
Ukraine (Kiev); CERCEC (EHESS; CNRS, Paris);  le Centre franco-russe de recherche en sciences
sociales  et  humaines (Moscow);  CNRS  (Paris);  CRH  (EHESS;  CNRS,  Paris);  the  Davis  Center
(Harvard University, Cambridge, MA); FMSH (Paris),  IHTP (CNRS); INED (Paris); INSHS (CNRS);
IRICE (université de Paris 1; CNRS, Paris); IRSEM (Ministry of Defense, Paris); Kaken, a Grant from
the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, administered by the Slavic Research Center at
Hokkaido University; Mairie de Paris; ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche
(Paris),  Ministero  dell’Università  e  della  Ricerca,  PRIN  “Ridefinire  la  nazione  diritti  di
cittadinanza et minoranze nelle crisi dello stato (1914-1999).”
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Cahiers du monde russe, 52/2-3 | 2011
4
2. We received 220 proposals from 20 different countries. A large number of them attested the
deep  renewal  of  this  research  field.  Unfortunately,  we  selected  only  30  contributions  even
though many of them were of great interest.
3. Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, Christoph Thonfeld, eds., Hitlers Sklaven: lebensgeschichtliche
Analysen zur Zwangsarbeit im internationalen Vergleich (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008).
AUTHORS
ALAIN BLUM
Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (EHESS/CNRS) and INED.
CATHERINE GOUSSEFF
Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (EHESS/CNRS).
ANDREA GRAZIOSI
University of Naples.
Preface
Cahiers du monde russe, 52/2-3 | 2011
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