Estonian Festival of Song and Dance

During World War II, the Soviet Union paid a huge price in human lives. All of the Soviet citizens stepped up in order to ensure Soviet victory. As a result, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a slight relaxation in what communism meant to the Soviet Union, in order to effectively reconstruct the war-torn […]

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The Big Deal

The Big Deal was a social reconstruction of Soviet culture after the war that instituted new ideas to include a boost in the economy.  My post will focus on this exactly looking at an artifact from Mass Culture in Soviet Russia edited by James con Geldern and Richard Stites. The piece I looked at is […]

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The Creation of the Cold War

Following the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was victorious but faced a whole new host of challenges and problems. They had transform their economy from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, had to deal with the influx of returning veterans, and had to guard themselves from future threats from western Europe. […]

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The “Real” Big Deal: Russia’s Impending Cold War with America

Vera Dunham’s self-titled “big deal” conforms well to the Soviet ideology of loyalty to country and the communist objective of happy, equal citizens. Stalin made very few agreements that were helpful to the general Soviet population, but the “big deal” was one that fulfilled multiple needs. Citizens enjoyed seeing Ally country economic successes, thus demanded […]

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