For Soviet Leadership, the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students was a prime opportunity to illustrate the Soviet Union as “an international, active, peace-loving population that was collectively committed to promoting an alternative to American exploitation around the world.” The festival contributors were depended upon to exhibit Soviet Youth as superior, having admirable ethics and awareness. These youth were not only expected to convey these ideals, but also give the impression to the world delegates that they were invigorated by the memorandum in Khrushchev’s 20th Party Congress speech and embody “Soviet openness and international mobilization.” The Youth was supposed to present these sentiments and ideals as “participants who were acting of their own free will” as a means to revise the public assumption of a forcible Soviet government. Margaret Peacock portrays the 1957 festival as endeavoring to “replace older Stalinist visions of grateful, insulated Soviet youngsters with new images of well educated, independent, creative and activist youth” competent of international opposition with capitalism.
Monthly Archives: April 2015
Soviet Youth: Perception of Reformation
As General Secretary of the Party, Kruschev wanted to show the World that the Soviet Union had ascended morally from its earlier Stalinist years. He wanted to prove that as a reformer of the Soviet Union, that the face of the Soviets had changed to represent the growing youth in the country who would bring their knowledge and new ideals to the Party. This represented the deconstruction of the old Colonial Soviet Union and the reformation of the party idealism. Kruschev and Komosol wanted to emulate that the Soviet Union youth were on the precipice of enacting a social revolution of sorts. However the Western media would conceive this ritual to be an act, that the youth had no say over policy from within the Party. The Moscow World Festival was an illustration of the social warfare that was being conducted by the Soviets and the West as both sides perceived this ceremonial event quite differently. There was and is very little that these two very culturally different geographical regions can understand the same way, policies meant to be executed for progress will be perceived as pugnacious and belligerent.
Fascism and the Inevitability of War & Stalin’s Master Plan
Fascism and the Inevitability of War & Stalin’s Master Plan
When representatives from Germany and the USSR established the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, it is difficult to tell whether the Soviets actually believed in the treaty lasting. The fact that the war resulted in a victory for the Allies and the USSR probably allowed the Soviets to see the war differently than the Axis powers, certainly with a different bias. In Joseph Stalin’s 1946 speech, he seemed to think that because the Germans were fascist with the Nazi Party at the helm, war was inevitable. He pinpointed this circumstance on an ideological belief inherent in fascist politics – the need to acquire more foreign territory and attain world domination. He cited that the only reason the Soviets were willing to work alongside capitalist powers like the U.S. and Britain was via a common enemy, the fascists. All three of those parties disliked that the fascists eliminated the sovereignty of small, developing nations; it was likely for different reasons though. The U.S. and Britain likely wanted to see the small nation develop into a trading partner, or at least a suitable ally or buffer country, while the Soviets likely hope to establish a Communist movement there. In short, all three parties understood the fascists to be a threat to the freedom of lots of peoples and, for Stalin and the Soviets, an inevitable source of conflict.
If Stalin believes that the fascists would inevitably create conflict, then why would he sign a treaty with Nazi Germany? In short, there are a few potential answers to this question. Firstly, Stalin could be lying through his teeth and merely just trying to cover himself in this speech; it is, after all, an “election.” Maybe Stalin honestly thought the Germans would honor their agreement. There is also the possibility that Stalin merely wished to delay the inevitable, giving him more time to prepare for a Soviet attack. Without this agreement, Hitler may have jumped straight from Poland and Austria, to the USSR. Stalin also must have known that Hitler’s hatred of Marxists and Communists would have to ground itself somehow.
However, the last possibility is perhaps the most striking, and the boldest out of the three ideas presented here. (In short, bear with me on this one.) Stalin may have known that Hitler would try to stab him in the back and break an agreement; he has had to deal with lots of political enemies himself. Therefore, perhaps Stalin wanted the pact signed, almost as if to goad in or tempt the Nazis, to convince them that the Soviets were in a false sense of security. If a nation, like the USSR, can anticipate and prepare ahead of time for a backstabbing, then it can catch its opponent off guard immensely. Since a backstabbing relies heavily on the element of surprise, if one were to reverse that element, the backstabber would be caught in a near impossible situation. When the Nazis do finally attack the USSR in one of the largest military offenses in history, it initially resulted in heavy losses for the Soviets.[1] However, they were able to absorb the damage, get back on their feet pretty quickly, and retaliate with great strength, as Stalin described in his speech. The Soviets from that point onward made the offensive a war of attrition, using their home territory to their advantage. In short, they took out the German army quite skillfully. Lastly, Stalin continuously mentioned during his speech what a victory it was not just for the USSR as a whole, but for the Soviet social system, the Soviet state system, and for the Red Army. Stalin wanted to prove critics wrong, and Nazi Germany during WWII provided the perfect venue to demonstrate the USSR’s advancements. The U.S. did it during the Spanish-American War, and von Bismarck was well known for starting wars to help get Germany going; is it not unlikely that Stalin wanted WWII to happen and that he wanted Nazi Germany to invade?
[1] “Operation Barbarossa.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa.
Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin’s Speech
The Nazi-Soviet pact was a non-aggression pact signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939. It stated that neither country would attack the other, and that neither would ally with an enemy country of the other. In addition it divided Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland into Soviet and German “spheres of influence” through a secret protocol.
The pact gave the Soviet Union safety from the Nazis, which was important because the Soviets were neither militarily nor economically prepared for war. It gave Germany access to Poland, which they invaded on September 1, 1939. The pact was broken when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Stalin’s speech addressed the industrial advancements the Soviet Union saw during the mid 1900s, and the challenges it faced during WWII. Stalin explained that the advancements were due to the communal hard work of the Soviet people during the five-year plans, and described WWII as an obstacle that was overcome through coordination and strength.
Nazi-Soviet Pact/Stalin’s Speech
The first of Wednesday’s readings, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, was a document that created a mutually beneficial, albeit brief, truce between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Although both countries had fundamentally different political systems and ambitions, Russia favored entering into a non-aggression pact because it knew that Germany was a highly industrialized, blossoming state that posed them a significant threat. Stalin knew that if Hitler chose to strike Russia, they would not be adequately prepared to defend themselves. At first the truce benefitted Germany because once they decided to engage most of Europe, they knew that they would not be required to fight a two-front war as they had to do in the past during WWI. Hitler saw fit to violate this pact, which it appears to have been his intention all along, because it was part of his political ideology to remove the Jewish problem in the east in order to make room for the Lebensraum to house the burgeoning German population. He believed that Russia could be easily taken, allowing Germans to reclaim the territory that is rightfully theirs, from the Bolshevik/Jewish “menace.”
The second of Wednesday’s readings, Stalin’s speech form 1946, was the speech that highlighted his re-election campaign. In this speech he attributed Russia’s victory to the effectiveness of the country’s Soviet system. Stalin adamantly professed the efficacy of the system when he stated, “The issue now is no longer the viability of the Soviet state system, because there can be no doubt about its viability…” While it is true that Russia was much more effective fending off Germany in WWII than WWI, Stalin asserted that no other system could have achieved such positive results. While arguing for the efficacy of his Five Year plans, he compared Russia’s output in 1941 to that of 1913. He used suspect reasoning while justifying his argument with these statistics because Russia was in such a dismal state of affairs in 1913 that the gains experienced during this interval of time could in fact be considered, “the simple and ordinary development of a country from backwardness to progress.” Once Germany violated their Non-Aggression pact, Russia was put on the defensive and nearly taken over by Germany. For a nation as large and populous as Russia, the industrialization achieved by 1941 was still relatively lackluster. When Stalin stated in his speech that “it does not resemble the picture of the way our army was supplied during the First World War, when the front suffered chronic shortages of artillery and shells, when the army fought without tanks and aircraft, and when one rifle was issue for every three men,” he is partially incorrect because that was the Red Army’s state of affairs for much of the first half of the war. During the battle of Stalingrad troops were sent into battle rifleless, similarly to WWI. Also, Stalin was forced to pass order #227, which stated that any man who made an attempt to retreat was to be gunned down by his own troops who were stationed in the rear of the lines.[1] He failed to take into consideration the fact that any population facing the brink of total annihilation will do anything in their power to survive by focusing the entire nation’s efforts and resources towards the war effort, regardless of what system is in place. Stalin used the Russian victory as a springboard to launch his reelection campaign. He only highlighted the positive aspects of the war, which obviously cumulated with a Soviet victory against their antagonistic, Nazi-German enemy. What he chose to exclude from his speech was the 21 to 28 million deaths that the Soviet Union experienced during the war – far more than any other participating nation.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._227
Nazi-Soviet Pact
It’s not surprising that Nazi would make compromission with Soviet Union, their so-called biggest enem because that non-invasion pact let those two nations both benefited.
For Germany, the pact released it from the threaten to face two long battle lines in West and East and temporarily avioded the formation of a larger anti-Germany alliance which included Soviet Union, England and France. In fact in 1939 Soviet Union, England and France had an negotiation in Moscow as well. With this pact and the appeasement policies of France and England, Germany further expand it’s sphere of influence and divided Poland with Soviet Union which made it more prepared for the invasion to the whole Europe.
For Soviet Union, this pact let it had time to recover it’s millitary force which had been deeply damaged in counter-revolutionary elimination because too many experienced generals been persecuted. In the Soviet-Finnish War in 1939, the weakness of Soviet army been exposed. When Germany invaded Soviet Union, it’s army had reorganized and showed considerable strength. Moreover, by annexing other countries in east Europe, Soviet Union expanded it’s depth in defense and made the invasion became more hard.
Youth Delegates at the Moscow World Fair
Youth and children in general are widely known for being easily influenced and moulded. So why then, did the Soviet Union choose this particular demographic to represent the face of the nation? Was it because the party wanted to ensure delegates would only spout Soviet propaganda? If that it true, then the 1957 World Moscow Festival did, in fact, completed some of the goals it set out to accomplish. As Peacock notes in her article, The Perils of Building Cold War Consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students, there were no organized protests during this particular festival. Delegates routinely answered questions with the same responses, presenting the unified, joyous front imperative for both Soviet propaganda and ideology. More importantly, perhaps, was the exchange of cultures that occurred between delegates of different nationalities. Soviet delegates, and those from other communist nations, were exposed to the capitalistic lifestyle normative of most of Europe and the West. In return, delegates from Europe and the West received a look into life in the Soviet Union, albeit a carefully constructed and falsified one. Although the majority of delegates were probably already members of a communist organization within their home country, the Moscow World Festival allowed them unprecedented access to the actual application behind Marxist theory. The festival may not have completely accomplished its political agenda, but it provided a cross-cultural exchange that laid the groundwork for future interactions between the world’s youth.
The Significance of the 1957 Moscow World Festival
In Peacock’s article, the 1957 Moscow World Fair is established as a symbol for the newly-found importance in the youth’s involvement in the Soviet Union. Peacock begins by pointing out the World Festival’s display of this view is not only for the international community, but to the Soviet youth as well.
Peacock give some historical context to the feeling of necessity of the government to reemphasize the importance of the youth. In World War II, the youth of that time “suffere disproportionately at the hands of the Nazis” who were able to “understand the necessity of peace against imperialist aggression” (Peacock 517). This resulted in the USSR feeling the need to shelter these youth from the outside world, especially capitalist/Western influences. This imposed a sweeping restriction on all foreign art mediums.
Peacock then argues that when the 1957 World Fair was held, the significance of culture became evident, as it was just as important to be winning the cultural war along with the economic and militaristic wars. The Soviet organizers of the fair aimed to show the inspiring and joyous lives of the youth, who were oft culturally isolated, especially during the late Stalinist period. The organizers transformed the neighboring parts of the city to embody this idealistic youthfulness, which even some of the Soviet youth had never even seen before.
Peacock then counters the Soviet’s facade of joy with the West’s “descriptions of the festival…consistently met these apparent manifestations of happiness with skepticism” (Peacock 525). Peacock states that the machine like nature was too prevalent, and the youth simply could not be happy while being in this robotic nature. American youth delegates at the fair had a number of incidents with rule-breaking, which exacerbated the western media’s views of the Soviets.
Despite the West’s negative publicity, American youth were genuinely intrigued by the Soviet Union’s policies, some even changing their view altogether. The Soviet youth showed that they were “all the same”, and were successful in casting off their stereotypes to foreign delegates. The world fair was successful for the Soviet’s as it changed the international community’s perception of them, in addition to solidifying a collective unity of the Soviet youth.
Non-Aggression Pact and Stalin’s Speech
In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that paved the way for WWII. Some of the provisions in the pact included a ban on aggression or violence between the two countries, information dealing with the interests of both countries was to be exchanged, and disputes were to be settled through “friendly exchange …or through the establishment of arbitration commissions.” This pact had benefits for both parties. Stalin recognized that his army was not strong enough to stand up against the German military, and his country was not in the economic position to go to war. Germany was very much prepared for war, and this pact gave Germany clear access to Poland. In addition to the main provisions, possibilities of how to divide land after the war were discussed between both parties. However, this pact was broken on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
While Germany went back on the non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union had enough time to build up industrialization, productivity, and properly arm the Red Army. In Stalin’s speech, WWII is presented as an obstacle that was overcome by Soviet Organization and planning. Stalin points out earlier shortcomings, such as the ill-equipped nature of the Red Army during WWI. However, industrialization increased rapidly, and to give an example, five and a half times more coal was produced in 1940 than was produced in 1913. In the speech, Stalin stressed how Soviet organization was able to overcome the challenges of war, and stated capitalism is the root of catastrophic wars. While this speech was given to members of his electorate district, the speech has far ranging messages. Soviet greatness allowed the USSR to overcome the horrors of war, industrialize rapidly, and avoid the capitalism which created the terrible world wars. While the non-aggression treaty was broken in 1941, it allowed for enough time to build up the Soviet economy and army.
http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/german-soviet-nonaggression-pact
The perils of building Cold War consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students
The importance of the young people to the Soviet regime is widely known. Children were to have sheltered, happy, healthy and vibrant childhoods to show the prosperity of Stalin’s reign. By 1957, the political party leader has changed and the propaganda is shifting. Fortunately, the problem of the thousands of homeless and vagrant youths no longer exists. The child labor camps and the elapse of time allowed many of these orphans from WWII to grow up. The Soviet youth are now to symbolize the organized populace peacefully and actively demonstrating against the propaganda of the United States during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States fought their ‘proxy wars’ in third world countries, but also in the media. Each side attempted to highlight their own strengths and their opponent’s faults. This sets the stage for the massive campaign organized by Russia to host the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students. Russia obviously has to appear to the world as the more virtuous and successful nation. Therefore, years before the event, construction takes place to many of the buildings within Moscow and throughout the city, a rejuvenation of the landscape commences. Months before the event, the police have orders to clean up the streets of any undesirable people. The Soviet youths who will participate in the large-scale project of showing the world that the Russian people are prospering, united, active and willing participants of the government had thoroughly rehearsed the party line to respond to all questions. The grandiose events were numerous and designed to show case the achievement of socialism.
The soviets “saw this festival as a project that would ultimately present a choreographed display of Soviet popularity and moral ascendancy…and would provide a public venue for the demonstration of Soviet wealth and benevolence.” ((Margaret Peacock, The perils of building Cold War consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students ((Cold War History, 2012) 518)) Overall, the event is successful and praised by attendees, but contact with Moscow from the outside world allowed the emergence of debate on both sides. Ironically, one journalists proved that they were successful. Rinto Alwi, a correspondent for an Indonesian newspaper said that, “this is all artificial, perfected and directed from higher up.” ((Margaret Peacock, The perils of building Cold War consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students ((Cold War History, 2012) 524)) What do you think? Would the Soviets have been better off not attempting to control every detail of the event? Could all of the delegates have then been able to focus more on the magnificence of the events and less on the propagandized slogan of willing youths robotically saying the same thing? More importantly, would it have been any different if the United States were hosting such an event? Ironically, maybe the US and Russia had more in common than they presumed.