Dr Filip Slaveski will present his paper, “Defeat in Victory: ‘Rebuilding’ Stalin’s post-war Soviet Union, 1945-55”, at our History Seminar Series on Wednesday 17 May (11am).

Abstract:

Soviet society’s experience of the Second World War endured long beyond its nominal end in 1945. There was no ‘transition’ from war to ‘peace’ for millions of citizens, only vacillations between wartime emergency and its absence in the first post-war decade. This talk explores the question of how Soviet society ‘rebuilt’ when it was still suffering from the enduring wartime conditions of mass hunger, population displacement and violence.  It does so by discussing case studies from declassified Soviet archives concerning land disputes in the collective farm sector, which lays bare the broader tensions in post-war reconstruction in the Union and may provide insights for other histories.