This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

This chapter explores Stalin's approach to China, in particular his difficult relationship with Mao Zedong. It shows Stalin at pains to redefine his strategy as the Chinese Civil War produced an unexpected set of victories for the Communists. By delving into the details of Anastas Mikoyan's negotiations with Mao in Xibaipo, and later Mao's talks with Stalin in Moscow, the chapter brings out hidden tensions between would-be allies while explaining how and why, despite these tensions, Beijing and Moscow managed to conclude a treaty of alliance. The chapter also explores the road to the Korean War, highlighting Stalin's reasons for permitting North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in June 1950. The war allowed Stalin to both strengthen the Sino-Soviet alliance and keep the Americans occupied, postponing the possibility of a conflict in Europe.

Was the Cold War inevitable, and who is responsible for its outbreak? This chapter argues that, as the Second World War neared its end, Joseph Stalin was shopping for a great bargain with the Allies, in keeping with Russia's realpolitik tradition. While the details of Stalin's vision remain blurry, evidence from internal Soviet deliberations in 1944–45 points to a broadly imperial, nineteenth-century, conceptualization of the Soviet role in Europe. Stalin sought both power and legitimacy, and understood that the Americans could endorse or reject his postwar claims. He could and did measure his appetites in pursuit of legitimate gains—those that had Washington’s imprimatur. Despite his efforts to achieve legitimacy at Yalta, Stalin’s hopes for a Soviet–American agreement to divide the world soon began to run aground, largely owing to his own rapacity and bad faith.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

This chapter is concerned with the last period of Churchill’s premiership and leadership of the Conservative Party. It focusses not just on the last part of his ‘Indian summer’ when back in office but also on the tempestuous moves and motives of the Conservatives to compel his retirement in an age before party leadership elections. It also examines Churchill’s manoeuvres to frustrate these ambitions and continue in power. While many studies have examined how British politicians gain the leadership of political parties, there has been less analysis of their inevitable fall. The chapter is written primarily from the Conservative perspective since, until the 1965 Douglas-Home Rules which established leadership elections and procedures, so-called customary processes existed to enable, largely without public knowledge (and even beyond the engagement of many Conservative politicians themselves), the emergence, and removal, of leaders ‘for the good of the party’.

The chapter examines Churchill’s role on the international stage and his summit diplomacy with Roosevelt and Stalin. Faced with the surprise collapse of France in 1940, he was forced to seek new partners, assiduously courting the United States while seizing the opportunity of an alliance with the Soviet Union. The result was that he had to juggle the conflicting demands of Roosevelt and Stalin, embarking on strenuous personal diplomacy in the face of declining British influence. The chapter reviews the key decisions of the major meetings before looking at their postwar legacy in Churchill’s attempts to advance European reconciliation and his ultimately unsuccessful bid to resume summitry with the Soviet Union.

This 1956 essay, marking the 39th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, was one of several articles that Du Bois contributed to New World Review, a publication associated with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and the Communist Party of the United States. Du Bois highlights the exemplarity of the Russian Revolution for anticolonial struggles and the Soviet Union’s support of national liberation. Significant in this essay is also Du Bois’s obfuscation of the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, a key feature of his late writings.

Russia is the world’s largest country by landmass, covering an area of 17 million square kilometres. Canada, the world’s second-largest country, is less than 10 million square kilometres in size. At the beginning of 2022, before the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow, Russia’s capital, was home to more billionaires than any other city on earth. Yet Russians are relatively poor compared with their western and eastern neighbours. The GDP per capita of Russians is only half that of Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, and less than a quarter of that of Japan, its easternmost neighbour. Why is it that the average Russian has lagged behind, despite the nation’s apparent opulence?

The answer lies in the country’s economic institutions. By the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was already a poor country relative to its neighbours. It had only abolished serfdom in 1861.

It is well known that Britten visited the Soviet Union on five occasions between 1960 and 1971 and established warm friendships with members of the Soviet musical elite: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Galina Vishnevskaya. Using a range of declassified archival material, this article places this engagement in the wider historical context of Anglo-Soviet political, commercial, and cultural relations, from the wartime alliance with Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It considers the operation of the Anglo-Soviet Cultural Agreement, alongside the importance of individuals such as the impresario Victor Hochhauser and a sequence of supportive British ambassadors and cultural attachés. It also examines the role of the British Council on the ground and some of the constraints placed upon this cultural engagement through resourcing and the rules of the political game. Finally, it assesses engagement beyond Britten’s lifetime, in the light of the visits of pop artists such as Sir Cliff Richard and the Bootleg Beatles to the Soviet Union and the first performances of works hitherto taboo, such as Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.

One of the individuals Mailer most frequently cited as an influence was writer and Marxist intellectual Jean Malaquais, who he met just after publishing The Naked and the Dead. Malaquais’ influence is perhaps most evident in Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore (which, somewhat ironically, Malaquais himself did not care for). As the years went on, Malaquais’ influence waned as Mailer’s own philosophies began to diverge from those of his mentor, though the two remained close, with the exception of a falling out in the 1990s. In fact, in his preface to Malaquais’ novel The Joker, Mailer also wrote that the author “had more influence upon my mind than anyone I ever knew.”

This chapter examines victory in the war as an object of commemoration in late-Stalinist Moscow with an eye toward the paradoxical features of postwar commemorative culture. In particular, the analysis attempts to square a persistent, all-Soviet variant of the war narrative with the simultaneous public veneration of key events and personalities from the prerevolutionary Russian past. Rather than an ideological symbiosis, which seamlessly linked the war and the celebration of tsarist and other prerevolutionary accomplishments in a patriotic “double axis,” the chapter argues that postwar Soviet patriotism is better understood as an assemblage of disparate and contradictory, and at times highly fragmented, themes and images. Where the celebration of the Russian national past functioned to redirect and contain nationalistic impulses lest they disrupt the hierarchical integrity of the friendship of the peoples, representations of the war as a pan-Soviet event provided an alternative means of social mobilization amid the early Cold War, one that offset appeals to ethnic difference with a vision of a homogeneous Soviet people.

This chapter focuses on efforts to de-Stalinize the war’s memory and recalibrate Soviet identity in the wake of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult. It shows that the Khrushchev-era program to create a distinctly Soviet historical mythology was contested and had a number of unintended consequences. The project to eradicate Stalin’s cult prompted a critical engagement with the Russian historical motifs that had been a staple of Stalinist patriotic culture. As Khrushchev picked up his assault on the personality cult in 1961, there emerged what this chapter identifies as a “crisis of patriotic identity,” which centered on renewed friction between the pan-Soviet and Russocentric paradigms. The more overt push to instill a pan-Soviet sense of allegiance raised concerns among Russophile intellectuals about the preservation of unique ethnic identities, histories, and hierarchy. Ideologists attempted to forestall this crisis through the “doctrine of the Soviet people,” which elevated the war victory as an exclusively pan-Soviet achievement, while cordoning off Russocentric themes within prerevolutionary and early Soviet narratives.

This chapter explores ideological production and commemoration in the late Stalinist era through the lens of the fledgling myth of victory in World War II. Specifically, the chapter pursues the afterlife of Stalin’s oft-cited toast to the Russian people in both Russian and non-Russian contexts to tease out its rather inconsistent and ambiguous connection to the official war narrative. Far from a consistent Russocentric ideological rubric, this chapter shows that the Stalinist leadership refused to commit to an exclusively Russocentric understanding of the war. Rather, it allowed an “internationalist” paradigm to coexist with its Russocentric counterpart in discursive tension throughout the era. As Stalin’s toast was eliciting mixed reactions, party ideologues shaped a divergent set of postwar narratives geared toward mobilizing local populations along contrasting ideological planes. So long as the core ingredients of victory – Stalin’s leadership, party guidance, the Soviet system, the unwavering heroism of the Red Army and citizenry – remained in place, the myth’s articulators were free to promote a range of competing narratives, from accounts emphasizing a homogenous collection of Soviet people bound latterly in “friendship” to those stressing Russian “elder brotherhood" and ethnic diversity.

Chapter 2 focuses on the critical role played by Chinese Comintern delegate Wang Ming in the birth of the second Communist–Nationalist “United Front” of 1937 following the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War. It begins with a summary of the first months of the war, with the capture of Peking and Shanghai, and soon the Nationalist capital of Nanjing. This is followed by a summary of the situation for socialism in Germany, Spain, and the Soviet Union, providing context for Soviet support of the Chinese in their war against Japan. Wang’s meeting with Mao Zedong in the Communist Party (CCP) wartime base of Yan’an is discussed, with an overview of his arguments for uniting with KMT forces under Chiang Kai-shek, before turning to a discussion of Wang’s meeting with the Nationalist leader in Wuhan. Zhou Enlai’s appointment to vice director of the Political Department is discussed as a way of pulling Communists into Chiang’s government without recognizing them as equals. In contrast, evidence of Wang’s relative success in developing a political platform around which all anti-Japanese groups could unite in Wuhan is presented. Finally, the eventual abandonment of Wuhan under the orders of Chiang is discussed, and the conflict between Mao and Wang is explored in light of later purges.

The second ’half’, as identified in this book, of Stanislavsky’s artistic enterprise sees him insistently separating art – thus theatre – from politics in the decades after 1917 in which political engagement and political misalignment were matters of life and death. This chapter puts paid to the myths that Stanislavsky was politically naïve and incompetent and as well administratively incompetent. Such biased but reproduced ‘received wisdom’ has failed to acknowledge the actual complexities of the MAT’s struggles to survive the onslaughts of continuing brutal change, particularly of the later 1920s and well into the 1930s during which Stanislavsky was obliged by moral imperatives together with political subterfuges to protect his life’s work. Doing so meant entering into correspondence with Stalin, also to argue against decisions made by his totalitarian leadership concerning the theatre. Most notable was Stanislavsky’s unassuming but well understood protection of Meyerhold and Shostakovich.

Meyerhold’s theatre trajectory is juxtaposed against those of the Proletkult, the Blue Blouse groups, Agitprop and TRAM, highlighting Meyerhold’s theatre innovations while pointing out how the MAT managed its compromises until state co-option triumphed and left Stanislavsky continuing valuable research outside his own edifice but in his last studios.