UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Ideologues and Pragmatists: World War II, New Communists, and Persistent Dilemmas of the Soviet Party-State, 1941-1953(2010) Stotland, Daniel; David-Fox, Michael; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The decision-making paradigm of the Soviet party-state was defined by the persistent shortage of qualified manpower that afflicted the Russian elite. The traditional Russian problems of under administration, combined with the unique features of the Soviet political system, resulted in a dichotomy between practical and ideological demands. The era of WWII provides a microcosm of pressures facing the Kremlin and illustrates the cyclical nature of policy formation forced on it by the paradoxes of the system. As the party's responsibilities expanded into specialized economic and military areas, political experts increasingly depended on the specialized professionals. These trends grew increased drastically during the war. An unexpected consequence of the party's expansion into economic or military professions was the discovery that co-optation worked both ways and many party members become managers rather than ideological overseers. Throughout the existential crisis of the system - the war and its aftermath - the party would find itself in a fundamental conflict over its identity, challenged over its role both vis-a-vis the state and its own priorities. After an abortive attempt by Zhdanov to reverse the wartime trends, a new paradigm was articulated by the party during the last five years of Stalin's reign. This resulted in the emergence of a new elite consensus which envisioned the party as intergral and invasive economic actor. This shift in the party's identity was the price of maintaining centralized political power and came at the expense of the focus on ideological purity. In the long term, however, the diminished role of ideology robbed the party of its core value system and steadily eroded its legitimizing and self-energizing power. Over time, the new consensus would undermine the very foundations of the party-state construct. Yet if the USSR was to survive as a modern, industrialized state, the accommodation with the technocrats was necessary. The contradiction between ideological and pragmatic aims was inherent to the system, and demanded an eventual choice between the long-term health of the state and that of the party.Item From The Tito-Stalin Split to Yugoslavia's Finnish Connection: Neutralism before Non-Alignment, 1948-1958(2008-09-22) Kullaa, Rinna; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After the Second World War the European continent stood divided between two clearly defined and competing systems of government, economic and social progress. Historians have repeatedly analyzed the formation of the Soviet bloc in the east, the subsequent superpower confrontation, and the resulting rise of Euro-Atlantic interconnection in the west. This dissertation provides a new view of how two borderlands steered clear of absorption into the Soviet bloc. It addresses the foreign relations of Yugoslavia and Finland with the Soviet Union and with each other between 1948 and 1958. Narrated here are their separate yet comparable and, to some extent, coordinated contests with the Soviet Union. Ending the presumed partnership with the Soviet Union, the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 launched Yugoslavia on a search for an alternative foreign policy, one that previously began before the split and helped to provoke it. After the split that search turned to avoiding violent conflict with the Soviet Union while creating alternative international partnerships to help the Communist state to survive in difficult postwar conditions. Finnish-Soviet relations between 1944 and 1948 showed the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry that in order to avoid invasion, it would have to demonstrate a commitment to minimizing security risks to the Soviet Union along its European political border and to not interfering in the Soviet domination of domestic politics elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Following Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Soviet bloc, its party leadership increasingly granted the Foreign Ministry resources needed to establish a wider and more important range of diplomatic relations than those of any East European state. The placement of Tito's closest associate Kardelj as Foreign Minister from August 1948 to January 1953 carried the process forward. It created a Yugoslav Foreign Ministry that produced political analysis independent from that of Tito's own committee on foreign relations. By 1953, the ministry regarded the Finnish model of neutralism as a solution to the Yugoslav security dilemma. It came to abandon that in favor of the Non-Aligned Movement only after 1958, when it became clear that relations between Yugoslav and Soviet parties would not be harmonious even after rapprochement.Item Reporting from the frontlines of the First Cold War: American diplomatic despatches about the internal conditions in the Soviet Union, 1917-1933(2007-11-27) Asgarov, Asgar Movsum; David-Fox, Michael; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Following the Bolshevik Revolution in November of 1917, the United States ended diplomatic relations with Russia, and refused to recognize the Soviet regime until 1933 when President Franklin Roosevelt reversed this policy. Given Russia's vast size and importance on the world stage, Washington closely monitored the internal developments in that country during the non-recognition period. This dissertation is study of the American diplomatic despatches about the political, economic and social conditions in the USSR in its formative years. In addition to examining the despatches as a valuable record of the Soviet past, the dissertation also explores the ways in which the despatches shaped the early American attitudes toward the first Communist state and influenced the official policy. The American diplomats, stationed in revolutionary Russia and later, in the territories of friendlier nations surrounding the Soviet state, prepared regular reports addressing various aspects of life in the USSR. Following the evacuation of the American diplomatic personnel from Russia toward the end of the Civil War, the Western visitors to Russia, migrants, and Soviet publications became primary sources of knowledge about the Soviet internal affairs. Under the guidance of the Eastern European Affairs Division at the U.S. State Department, the Americans managed to compile great volumes of information about the Soviet state and society. In observing the chronological order, this dissertation focuses on issues of particular significance and intensity such as diplomatic observers' treatment of political violence, repression and economic hardships that engulfed tumultuous periods of the Revolution, Civil War, New Economic Policy and Collectivization. The dissertation also examines the American recognition of the Soviet state in the context of the diplomatic despatches about the Soviet internal conditions.