The article offers an overview of modern historical data on the origins, causes of World War II, the decisive role of the USSR in its victorious end, and also records the main results and lessons of World War II.
Hitler's Germany was the main cause of World War II. Nazism, racial theory, mixed with far-reaching geopolitical designs, became the combustible mixture that ignited the fire of global conflict. The war with the Soviet Union was planned to be waged with particular cruelty.
The preconditions for the outbreak of World War II were the humiliating provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty for the German people, as well as the attitude of the "Western democracies" to Russia after 1917 and the Soviet Union as an outcast of world development. Great Britain, France, the United States chose for themselves a policy of ignoring Moscow's interests, they were more likely to cooperate with Hitler's Germany than with Soviet Russia. It was the "Munich Agreement" that became the point of no return to the beginning of the Second World War. Under these conditions, for the USSR, its own security and the conclusion of a non-aggression pact with Germany began to come to the fore, defining the "spheres of interests" of the parties in order to limit the advance of German troops towards the Soviet borders in the event of German aggression against Poland. The non-aggression pact gave the USSR just under two years to rebuild the army and consolidate its defensive potential and pushed the Soviet borders hundreds of kilometers westward. The signing of the Pact was preceded by the failure in August 1939 of the negotiations between the military missions of Britain, France and the USSR, although Moscow took the Anglo-French-Soviet negotiations with all seriousness.
The huge losses of the USSR in the summer of 1941 are explained by the following circumstances: before the war, a large-scale modernization of the Red Army was launched, a graduate of a military school did not have sufficient experience in managing an entrusted unit by June 22, 1941; the Red Army was going to bleed the enemy in border battles, stop it with short counterattacks by covering units, carry out defensive operations, and then strike a decisive blow into the depths of the enemy's territory, so the importance of a multi-echeloned long-term defense in 1941 was underestimated by the command of the Red Army and it was not ready for it; significant groupings of the Western Special Military District were drawn into potential salients, which was used by the Germans at the initial stage of the war; Stalin's fear of provoking Hitler to start a war led to slowness in making the most urgent and necessary decisions to bring troops to combat readiness.
The Allies delayed the opening of the second front for an unreasonably long time. They, of course, achieved outstanding success in the landing operation in France, however, the enemy's losses in only one Soviet strategic operation in the summer of 1944 ("Bagration") are not inferior, and even exceed, the enemy’s losses on the second front. One of the goals of "Bagration" was to help the Allies.
Soviet soldiers liberated Europe at the cost of their lives. At the same time, Moscow could not afford to re-establish a cordon sanitaire around its borders after the war, so that anti- Soviet forces would come to power in the border states. The United States and Great Britain took all measures available to them to quickly remove from the governments of Italy, France and other Western states all the left-wing forces that in 1944-1945 had a serious impact on the politics of their countries.
The Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations, established by culmination of World War II, was created to maintain the security and cooperation of states in the post-war world. Leaders of the Big Three, who ensured the Victory over the fascist-militarist bloc in 1945, made decisive contribution to its creation. This system cemented the world order during the Cold War years until the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the destruction of the bipolar structure of the organization of international relations. Post-Cold War changes stimulated the search for new structures of the international order. Article purpose is to characterize circumstances of foundations formation of postwar world and to show how the historical decisions made by the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition powers in 1945 are projected onto modern political processes. Study focuses on interrelated questions: what was the post-war world order and how integral it was? How did the political decisions of 1945 affect the origins of the Cold War? Does the American-centrist international order, that prevailed at the end of the 20th century, genetically linked to the Atlantic Charter and the goals of the anti- Hitler coalition in the war, have a future?
Many elements of the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations in the 1990s survived and proved their viability. The end of the Cold War and globalization created conditions for widespread democracy in the world. The liberal system of international relations, which expanded in the late XX - early XXI century, is currently experiencing a crisis. It will be necessary to strengthen existing international institutions that ensure stability and security, primarily to create barriers to the spread of national egoism, radicalism and international terrorism, for have a chance to continue the liberal principles based world order (not necessarily within a unipolar system). Prerequisite for promoting idea of a liberal system of international relations is the adjustment of liberalism as such, refusal to unilaterally impose its principles on peoples with a different set of values. This will also require that all main participants in modern in-ternational life be able to develop a unilateral agenda for common problems and interstate relations, interact in a dialogue mode, delving into the arguments of opponents and taking into account their vital interests.
The article deals with complex and controversial issues related to the uprising and liberation of Prague in May 1945. Interpretation of the events became acute and caused lively discussions in connection with the demolition of the monument to Marshal I. V. Konev on April 3, 2020 by the order of the local municipality. The Czech Republic is also discussing the idea of «perpetuating the role of other liberators» of the capital – soldiers of the ROA division, which for two days (May 6-7) provided assistance to the rebels. Using new documents from the Central archive of the Ministry of defense of the Russian Federation, the author draws a conclusion about the limited influence of the Vlasov units. They, indeed, brought confusion to the German ranks, but early in the morning of May 8, they themselves left Prague on a rapid march. After that, fighting and negotiations between the rebels and the German command continued. The article emphasizes that the main goal of the Soviet military operation from 6 to 11 May 1945 was the defeat of the German Army Group Center. The liberation of Prague was only part of a powerful offensive by three Soviet fronts. Heavy battles for Prague did not happen, but the entry of Soviet tanks into the Czech capital and the subsequent jubilation of local residents became a symbol of the end of the war in Europe. The author concludes that the demolition of monuments to Soviet soldiers and commanders is a manifestation of internal political struggle in the countries where it occurs, and the Czech Republic is only one of these examples.
The article introduces the publication of the recently declassified archival documents of the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation concerning the stay of a delegation of Soviet military leaders in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic on May 8-14, 1968, led by Marshal of the Soviet Union I.S. Konev. In August 2018, at the initiative of the Prague 6 City Council, metal “information plates” were installed on the pedestal of the monument to Marshal Konev, where among other things it was stated that “In 1968, he personally backed the intelligence surveillance preceding the invasion of the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact into Czechoslovakia". This action was part of measures to prepare public opinion for the removal of the monument. The documents being published show there is not the slightest reason to consider the soviet delegation headed by Marshal Konev as intelligence surveillance operation to prepare for an invasion. The internal political crisis in Czechoslovakia in early May had not yet reached its peak (the famous manifesto "Two Thousand Words" will be published only on June 27). The Soviet leadership, headed by L. Brezhnev hoped that the "Czechoslovak comrades" would be able to cope with the situation, "would rebuff the anti-socialist forces." The delegation of the Soviet military leaders had a symbolic, cultural significance and was intended to revive the memory of the events of 1945, of the victims of the Red Army and the brotherhood in arms of Soviet and Czechoslovak soldiers. In the extremely unstable and confused atmosphere of the “Prague Spring”, the members of the delegation sought to clarify the true state of affairs and public sentiments in the country. As Marshals Konev and Moskalenko admitted themselves, they “had no opportunity to fully understand all the processes”. The so-called "intelligence surveillance", which is mentioned in the Czech press, was carried out by them in a completely open way of meeting and exchanging views with colleagues, speaking at rallies, and communicating with workers. Moscow preferred to act at the time by political methods, gradually shifting to military pressure (the “Shumava” military exercises). The time for tough demands came later (negotiations in Čierna nad Tisou, July 29 – August 1, and in Bratislava on August 3, 1968). The final decision on the intervention was made by the Soviet political leadership after numerous consultations with partners in the socialist camp, largely under the influence of the tough position of the first secretary of the PUWP Central Committee W. Gomulka and the first secretary of the SED Central Committee V. Ulbricht.
- Cipher telegram from Ambassador S. Chervonenko No. 723-727 dated 9.05.68.
- Cipher telegram from Ambassador S. Chervonenko No. 738-741 dated 11.05.68.
- Report on the stay in Czechoslovakia from 8 to 14 May, 1968 marshals I. Konev and K. Moskalenko
- Report of Ambassador S. Chervonenko on the stay in Czechoslovakia of the Soviet military delegation in May 1968
The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.
The article is devoted to the Bleiburg myth in the politics of memory in modern Croatia. In mid-May 1945 the contingents which were trying to move to the West and avoid the possible reprisals against them by the victorious communists were transferred to the Yugoslav partisans by the British military administration. Among them prevailed the members of Croatian Ustasha and Slovene Home Guard, but there were also representatives of other nationalities of Yugoslavia. Soon after the war all the victims of the massacres that took place in 1945 and those who died from hunger and illness during the transfer were Croatized through the efforts of the Croatian emigration. After the collapse of Yugoslavia and during the war (1991–1995), the Bleiburg myth began to acquire official status. The return of Ustasha soldiers as heroes to the public sphere under F. Tudjman was due to the concept of «national reconciliation», which was carried out not through awareness of guilt and acceptance of responsibility for the crimes committed, but through their full or partial justification.
The first part of the article reviews the research literature on the Bleiburg myth, the stages of its formation and functional significance. The second part examines the public debate around the Sarajevo mass for the murdered and other commemorative events in the anniversary in May 2020. They are compared with the evaluations of the Bleiburg narrative-ritual complex expressed in the literature.
The 75th anniversary of Bleiburg commemorated in an atmosphere of fatigue from the restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic and on the eve of the Croatian parliamentary elections, demonstrated deep social division, the contested character of history and the political interest in discussing this tragedy. Comparison of the research literature with publications in the mass press indicates the obviousness of the functional model of the Bleiburg myth for a significant segment of Croatian society. Although the demand for renewal of the memorial repertoire seems to have increased, it is still not enough for the transition to the new politics of memory.
This article analyzes the work of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) of the USSR in the city of Kuibyshev (now Samara), where it was evacuated in 1941- 1943 together with other central government agencies and the diplomatic corps accredited in the USSR. Although this period was quite short, and though key decisions were, of course, made in Moscow, intense rough work was being carried out in the “reserve capital”, which ensured the solution of the tasks set by the country's leadership to the NKID apparatus.
The aggression of Nazi Germany found the Soviet Union poorly prepared not only militarily, but also diplomatically. Due to the opposition of the Western powers, domestic diplomacy failed to create a collective security system to prevent the aggression of Germany, Italy and Japan. Negotiations with representatives of Great Britain and France, which were conducted in 1939, were interrupted and relations with these countries were virtually frozen.
Some important strategic tasks were set before Soviet diplomacy. First of all, it was about the concentration of diplomatic activity in specific areas that could provide real assistance to the Red Army in obtaining the necessary weapons and strategic raw materials. Among other tasks were the search for allies, establishing effective military, economic and political cooperation with them, counteracting the expansion of the Nazi coalition at the expense of Sweden and Turkey, and conducting an extremely balanced policy in the Far East in order to avoid a military clash with Japan.
Due to the deterioration of the military situation on the Western Front and the imminence of the capture of Moscow, on October 16, 1941, the main staff of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, headed by its Deputy Chairman A. Vyshinsky, as well as members of the diplomatic corps were evacuated to Kuibyshev (now Samara). V. Molotov and a small group of assistants remained in Moscow.
The relations between the NKID and the embassies evacuated to Kuibyshev evolved differently. The level and the intensity of contacts with them largely depended on bilateral relations with the respective nations. Contacts with the embassies of Great Britain and the USA were naturally at the top of the agenda. By way of ambassadors of these countries the key tasks of forming the anti-Hitler coalition were being solved, and the dates of summit meetings were agreed upon.
The crowding of the central office staff and foreign diplomats in a small regional city certainly introduced difficulties into the practical implementation of many tasks. Nevertheless, the striving for a common victory and the awareness of responsibility to their own country, united this motley crew of diplomats, and facilitated the search for compromise solutions. The return to Moscow of the employees of the People’s Commissariat and the diplomatic corps took place after the victory in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. Only at the end of 1943 Kuibyshev did finally cede its status of the capital of the USSR to Moscow.
This article offers a review of the IR academic literature on international norms, exploring their functions and life cycle, as well as revealing that while the stages leading to their national adoption have been thoroughly studied, the implementation phase has mostly been neglected by scholars. It also considers the power international norms have to bring about change in different spheres and why states adopt them. The national implementation of international norms and the reasons why some norms reach compliance while others do not have been to a large extent overlooked. The reasons for this are multifold: while some scholars assume mature, or salient, norms automatically reach compliance or rely on the explanatory power of value conflicts, others point to the influence of groups of innovative experts or international pressure in ensuring norm implementation. Those describing the local adaptation of international norms offer the most convincing descriptions of how states attempt to implement international norms they have adopted. A gap persists, however, in the literature, with scholars focusing on the domestic reasons that norms may not be successfully implemented and neglecting the international ones. This article points out a gap in the influential constructivist literature on norms, emphasizing that if international norms adopted by national governments do not reach compliance, then the study of adoption and diffusion mechanisms loses its relevance.
The effects of climate change are becoming increasingly pronounced and powerful, taking on an alarming scale and imposing enormous economic and human costs on humanity. However, the burden of these costs is unevenly distributed with the poorest and most vulnerable bearing the heaviest toll. Such a situation requires specific and targeted measures, if the humanity seriously intends to meet the goals of International Sustainable Development Strategy. This is an unprecedented challenge to humanity not only because of the size of financial resources needed to be mobilized, but also because of the tension between socio-economic and political short, mid and long-term goals and aims, tension between the needs to ensure a rapid and quantitative economic growth and the needs to reduce mass poverty and social inequality. The article attempts to review policies and measures undertaken by governments and civil society groups to resolve the above tensions by developing integrative adaptation policies and measures, which allow to simultaneously address the problems of environment degradation, natural disaster risks and socio-economic development. It focuses on most vulnerable segments of population: self-employed and employees of micro, small and medium enterprises, both formal and informal. The article highlights prevailing world-wide trends in disaster risk management and risk reduction efforts and tries to identify most innovative and effective programs, which could be adjusted to specific conditions of Russia.
In economic research, much attention is traditionally paid to the issues of trade and economic cooperation between states and the development of international trade. This kind of research is based on the materials of official statistics of countries and international organizations, which are not always published on a comparable basis, making it difficult, and sometimes impossible to do an objective analysis of processes taking place both in bilateral economic relations and in international trade in general. The article deals with this important problem of comparability of statistical sources.
Using a large amount of factual and statistical material, the authors trace the changes that have occurred in world trade relations of the 21st century, paying special attention to the post-crisis period, they reveal the main features of the geographical and commodity structure of trade, they present a comparative analysis of the rates of development of world exports and imports by groups of countries, assess Russia's participation in international trade, and also demonstrate the methodological content of the main statistical indicators that are used to characterize foreign economic relations.
For many decades, international cooperation in the field of statistics has focused on the problem of unifying information on the foreign economic activity of countries. Solving this problem, the UN Statistical Commission has drawn up methodological documents, which are usually called "international statistical standards". Based on the study of these documents, as well as materials of official statistics of countries and other primary sources, the authors characterize the process of international standardization of information on foreign economic relations of countries. The article presents a critical analysis of the key provisions of the latest methodological standards of statistics, considers the practice of their application in countries, including the Russian Federation, identifies the main achievements and problems in this area.
BOOK REVIEWS
Books review: Bassin M. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Cornell University Press, 2016. 400 p.; Bassin M., Pozo G. (eds). The Politics of Eurasianism: Identity, Popular Culture and Russia's Foreign Policy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 384 p.; Clover Ch. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism.Yale University Press, 2017. 360 p. The review considers three works on Eurasianism, the theoretical geography of Lev Gumilev and contemporary Russian ethnonationalism. It places the reviewed works in the context of the historical ideological evolution of Eurasianism. The principal argument in all three reviewed texts is that there are three forms of Eurasian ideology: classical Eurasianism, Gumilevian Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism. This essay argues that instead of a rank appropriation of Eurasian ideology into contemporary Russian ethnonationalist discourses, there remains a great intellectual and theoretical power in Gumilevian Eurasianism that could yet be applied to contemporary Eurasian and Russophere geographies in a more positive and empowering manner than the current misappropriated form of Russian ethnonationalist Eurasianism. While neo-Eurasianism is a misappropriation of Gumilevian Eurasianism, a revival of a new fork of neo-Gumilevian Eurasianism could diffuse the contemporary Russian misappropriation and return to a more objective and inclusive Eurasian ideology.
ISSN 2541-9099 (Online)