19 Post-Stalin Era: Nationalism, Culture, and Foreign Policy

19 Post-Stalin Era: Nationalism, Culture, and Foreign Policy

Overview

• Main Themes

• Nationalities: From Fusion to Fission

• Culture: Thaw, Repression, Dissent

• Foreign Policy: Confrontation, Détente, Crisis

• Conclusions

A. Main Themes

• Nationality: neither integration nor suppression, denial and disintegration

• Khrushchev’s thaw: concessions and conflict

• Brezhnev era: repression and rise of dissent

• Antireligious campaigns

• Khrushchev’s USSR: confrontation

B. Nationalities: From Fusion to Fission

• Demography

• Post-Stalin Policy: Voluntary Fusion

• Politics: Slavic Center, Non-slavic periphery

• Economics

• Cultural issue: language, literature, religion

• Dissent: minority and Russian nationalism

• 1980s: Centrifugal forces prevail

Central Asia: Two Worlds

C. Culture

• Khrushchev: Concessions and Conflict

• “Thaw”
• Conflict and consternation
• Antireligious campaign

• Brezhnev: Repression and dissent

• Repression
• Dissidenty: Dissenters
• Diversity of dissent

Moscow Youth Festival (1957)

Krokodil Satire: Soviet Hippies (1969)

Boris Pasternak

Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Vladimir Vysotskii Bard and Actor

Leaving the Village (1965 Painting)

D. Foreign Policy

• Principal issues

• Khrushchev era

• Goals and strategy
• Bloc politics
• West: accommodation, competition, confrontation

• Brezhnev era

• Goals and strategy
• Bloc politics: Czechs, Chinese, and Poles
• Developing countries
• Détente
• Kabul and confrontation

Soviet Tanks in Budapest 1956

Budapest 1956

Mao, Stalin, Khrushchev

Khrushchev-Mao Negotiations 1959

“Good Morning, Africa!”

Prague 1968: Student Confronts Soviet Tank

Prague 1968: Students Exhort Soviet Soldiers to Leave

Afghanistan: Graveyard of Soviet Tanks

Soviet-Afghan War