The idea underlying the present theme issue developed during the 1990s and was established as a project between 1997 and 1998. To some extent, our undertaking was prompted by the wave of new Soviet Russian and East European studies literature (especially from the region itself) emerging in the wake of the transformation of 1989–91, since when there has been a veritable revival of the totalitarian approach. Narratives were organised along the well-known dichotomies of passive victimised societies and victorious, omnipotent and relentlessly oppressive party-states. As in western scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, historical and other studies of cultural and intellectual life under communism tended again to be coached in terms of conflicts between political rationality asserted with totalistic pretensions and idealised ‘communities’ of ‘knowledge’, ‘professionalism’, and ‘arts’, or in terms of conflicts between ideological and political legitimisation and ‘the uncompromising search for truth’ or ‘artistic experimentation’. Communist attempts politically to control knowledge and artistic production, their early efforts to secure monopolistic positions for particular epistemological and aesthetic paradigms (as in class-relativist science or socialist-realist art) have been seen and presented as a one-way imposition from above.

This article examines the emergence of the Soviet regulation of foreign travel in a specific context: the space in which Soviet international aspirations overlapped and interacted with Party–intelligentsia relations at home. The discussion ties together two major, international aspects of Party–intelligentsia relations. The first is a detailed discussion of the regulation of foreign travel, exploring the manner in which access to the outside world in the early Soviet years was, like other scarce or highly sought-after resources, subject to bureaucratic monopolisation and, as a result, became not only subject to party-state regulatory agendas but also a prime staple of patronage transactions. The second is an examination of how the emergence of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s began to influence Soviet domestic interactions with the non-party intelligentsia. Specifically, the article examines the particular way in which the intelligentsia was enlisted in foreign cultural relations by the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The article shows the policies and attitudes behind the creation of VOKS as an ostensibly non-governmental association and dissects the many aspects of its intricate engagement with the non-Party, intellectual public known by the Russian term obshchestvennost'. The analysis suggests that the widespread assumption that personal and bureaucratic relations are dichotomous or fully separable ignores the way in which institutional agendas and personal connections were routinely intertwined in Soviet patronage. Furthermore, key stages in the Soviet handling of the intelligentsia's access to international contacts, from the New Economic Policy to Stalin's ‘Great Break’ to the Great Purges, were fundamentally shaped by the intense ideological and cultural significance invested in the foreign cultural resources as they were transformed from prized assets to fatal sources of contagion.

This article utilises primarily archival sources to explore unofficial networks in the Stalinist music world. It analyses the relationship between the patrons, clients and brokers whose personal interactions helped an inefficient and over-burdened music bureaucracy to accomplish its two basic tasks: administering musical production and ensuring the material wellbeing of Soviet composers, musicologists and musicians. Musicians used unofficial networks to resolve professional disputes with bureaucratic institutions and to acquire material support, especially scarce apartments. Because they were used to manipulating bureaucratic procedures, unofficial networks sometimes came under attack. Investigating these ubiquitous informal interactions therefore contributes to our understanding both of the Stalinist music system and the cyclical campaigns to purge the Soviet arts.

This article analyses the strategic manipulation and use of contacts by artists and art historians in state-socialist Czechoslovakia, and focuses on the role of friendship, political favours, professional nepotism and bribery in this process. It criticises Howard Becker's belief that totalitarian regimes cannot partake in discourses of patronage common to Western democracies because of the lack of freedom of individuals. Instead, it argues that the conventional concept of patronage can only partly explain the motives behind the use of contacts by individuals, because its focus is limited to exploring vertical relationships between ‘powerless’ and ‘powerful’ social actors. The analysis therefore takes a wider and more dynamic view, and looks at the interplay of vertical and horizontal processes.

The article argues that the postwar years rather than the 1930s, as hitherto has been assumed, was the period when top administrators of the Soviet creative Unions acquired their super-elite status. It shows how in this period the Union leaders finalised their control over the production and distribution of, as well as the reward for, literary and artistic work. The article looks at the reasons behind the government's conscious decision to allow a small group from the intelligentsia to become part of the state elite. It also assesses the consequences of postwar government policies towards the intelligentsia for the long-term stability of the regime.

The formation of a relationship between early Soviet writers and the young Soviet state was conditioned by a pre-Revolutionary culture of patronage and clientelism among Russian literati. This culture enabled them to exert considerable influence over the state as they pushed it, via numerous state-based literary patrons, to provide them with a growing system of welfare and privilege in return for political support. In the literary battles of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin took control over all patronage chains and established himself as the single de facto patron of the literary world. His personality cult emerged from this process.

The article attempts a detailed analysis of the post-1956 purges in the field of economic research. It tries to identify and assess the role of patronage in protecting the field from lasting damage. Such damage was threatening in the form of both losing several young talents from the field as well as weakening the position of the empiricist research programme successfully launched in the immediate post-Stalin years of 1954–6. The analysis devotes great attention to the dialectical relationship between purge and patronage, that is, to the inevitability of certain senior communist patrons administering purges in order to be able to act as patrons.

Aniceto Afonso, História de uma conspiração: Sinel de Cordes e o 28 de Maio (Lisbon: Editorial Notícias, 2000), 222 pp., [euro]12.97, ISBN 972-46-1175-2. Manuel Baiôa, Elites políticas em Évora: Da I República à ditadura militar (1925–1926) (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 2000), preface by António Costa Pinto, xvi +344 pp., [euro]21.45, ISBN 972-762-199-6. Telmo Faria, Debaixo de fogo! Salazar e as forças armadas (1935–41) (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos & Instituto de Defesa Nacional, 2000), 286 pp., [euro]26.44, ISBN 972-762-220-8. João Medina, Salazar, Hitler e Franco: Estudos sobre a ditadura (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2000), 308 pp., [euro]18.85, ISBN 972-24-1074-1. Fernando Rosas, Salazarismo e fomento económico: O primado do político na história económica do Estado Novo (Lisbon: Editorial Notícias, 2000), 259 pp., [euro]13.92, ISBN 972-46-1110-8. Pedro Aires Oliveira, Armindo Monteiro: Uma biografia política (Venda Nova: Bertrand Editora, 2000), 340 pp., [euro]17.96, ISBN 972-25-1122-X.

Studies regarding the origins and nature of António Oliveira Salazar's New State are being published in Portugal at an impressive rate. New sources and methods are being employed by Portuguese historians in an attempt to come to grips with a dictatorship which lasted forty-eight years and which, although able to change its guise, was always reluctant to do so, and was never as successful in transforming itself as Francoist Spain.

Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream. A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 377 pp., $17.95, ISBN 0-691-05827-X. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, eds., Consumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 377 pp., $29.95, ISBN 0-8476-8649-3. Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 250 pp., $68.00, ISBN 1-85973-284-4. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 213 pp., $19.50, ISBN 1-85973-239-9. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending. European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Washington: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 477 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-521-62694-3.

The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of studies tracing the development of the principal institutions of ‘mass consumption’ in Westernised societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies of leading department stores and the marketing policies of major firms, publicity and sales methods, have sought to increase understanding of the actors or ‘professions’ instrumental in the transformation of such practices, their methods and scope, the reasons for their success and by extension the reasons for the failure of alternative practices, ‘small’ shopkeepers and ‘small’ industrialists who felt threatened by the wave of change.

Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, ed., 1968 – Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1998), 307 pp., [euro]36.81, ISBN 3-525-36417-2. Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968, with a Foreword by Douglas Kellner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) 192 pp., $18.95, ISBN 0-7914-4966-1. Gerhard Fels, Der Aufruhr der 68er. Zu den geistigen Grundlagen der Studentenbewegung und der RAF (Bonn: Bouvier, 1998) 286 pp., [euro] 23,01, ISBN 3-4160-2816-3. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 490 pp., $54.95, ISBN 0-521-64141-1 (hb) $18.95, ISBN 0-521-64637-5 (pb). Ingo Juchler, Die Studentenbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und – theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 459 pp., [euro]63.40, ISBN 3-428-08556-6. Michael Kimmel, Studentenbewegungen der 60er Jahre. Frankreich, BRD und USA im Vergleich (Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1998), 276 pp., [euro]14.31, ISBN 3-8511-4378-7. Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001), 554 pp., [euro]25.51, ISBN 3-4620-2985-1. Wolfgang Kraushaar, 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 370 pp., [euro]24.54, ISBN 3-9309-0859-X. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 903 pp., £25.00, ISBN 0-19-210022-X. Lutz Schulenburg, ed., Das Leben ändern, die Welt verändern. 1968. Dokumente und Berichte (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1998), 471 pp., [euro]20.35, ISBN 3-8940-1289-7.

1998 brought yet another outpouring of jubilee literature marking the thirtieth anniversary of that momentous year 1968. This time, however, there was a noticeable increase in books with a definite scholarly agenda. Thus, the title Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey adapted for her edited volume from François Furet may well capture the gist of a growing feeling: historians are eager to overcome the timeworn recollections of movement apologists and their adversaries and they are beginning to subject the 1960s to more objective analysis.