Questions for discussion:

Consider the impact of the Second World War on Soviet society. What policies did the Soviet state put in place to address the devastation wrought by the Nazi invasion? Was this a reconstruction or a reinvention of the USSR?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: Iosif Stalin, 'Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow. February 9, 1946'. Available online at: http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1947-2/cold-war/cold-war-texts/stalin-election-speech/

Elena Zubkova, ‘Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments’, in David Hoffmann, ed. Stalinism: The Essential Readings (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), pp. 277-301. Scan available here.

Juliane Fürst, ‘The Importance of Being Stylish: Youth, Culture and Identity in Late Stalinism’ in Juliane Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 209-230. Scan available here.

Selected further reading:

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

Konstantin Azadovskii & Boris Egorov, ‘From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism: Stalin and the Impact of the “Anti-Cosmopolitan” Campaigns on Soviet Culture,’ Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 4, Number 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 66-80.

David Brandenberger, ‘Stalin, the Leningrad Affair, and the Limits of Postwar Russocentrism’, Russian Review, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), pp. 241-255.

Mark Edele, ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin's Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Volume 50, Number 1 (2002), pp. 37-61.

Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), especially Chapter 9 ‘ From Isolationism to Globalization’.

Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997).