Иларионова (Изволенская) Татьяна Семеновна

The article focuses on the 70th anniversary of the presentation of First Secretary of the Central Committee N. S. Khrushchev's report “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Using the example of the transformations of the party education system ‒ the Academy of Social Sciences (AOS) under the CPSU Central Committee and the Higher Party School (VPSh) under the CPSU Central Committee ‒ the author demonstrates the fundamental changes in the lives of individuals, small but significant groups, and, finally, the USSR as a whole that followed the condemnation of the Stalinist repressions and the personality cult of Stalin himself. These changes also affected the educational process, which was now aimed not at training personally devoted communists ready to carry out any order from above, but at graduating specialists capable of pursuing a balanced domestic and foreign policy. Another visible change was the inclusion of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Higher Party School in international contacts, primarily with related organizations in socialist countries. Year after year, this cooperation expanded, even extending to capitalist countries: faculty and graduate students from the party education system began to travel for internships and research trips, which undoubtedly began to change their worldview. However, overall, the country was unable to achieve a break from Stalin's rules of life and his methods of policymaking for a long time. Only with the collapse of the regime itself could the process initiated by N.S. Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU be completed

Private archives and personal correspondence are an important historical source. On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory, the author revisits documents from her family archive. The author’s family has its own hero — Leonid Vladimirovich Izvolensky, who fought in the war from 1941 to 1945 and finished it with the rank of Guards Senior Lieutenant. He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class, and medals for “The Liberation of Warsaw,” “The Capture of Berlin,” “The Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941—1945,” and “For Courage.” He wrote about his exploits in letters to his parents only once, and even then, not until August 1945. In his letters home, the soldier was concerned about his parents’ health and that of his sick sister, their food supply, living conditions, and so on. Life during the war was full of hardships and struggles, both at the front and on the home front. The people’s spirit of mutual support and solidarity gave them the strength to defeat fascism and preserve the relationships they had built. Letters as a historical source open up new topics for researchers of the Great Patriotic War — topics related to wartime daily life not only on the front lines but also on the home front, in every household, in every family

The Soviet concept of friendship of peoples disappeared from political practice with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The article analyzes the causes of its occurrence and the directions of its practical implementation. For the first time, the author examines, using the example of legislative acts of the USSR, how the USSR leadership used the instrument of administrative and territorial division of the country to establish the “friendship of peoples”, how, through industrial projects in addition to other methods, the formation of the community of the Soviet people took place and how the education system served this purpose. The article pays special attention to the example of the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU (ASS under CC of CPSU), established in 1946. The Academy became an important organization that influenced the careers of party and Soviet officials. From the very beginning, the emphasis was on the admission of graduate students and students from different regions and republics of the USSR. Over the years, its teaching staff also became multinational. The example of the ASS under the CC of the CPSU showed the general course of the Soviet state towards creating conditions for close communication between people of different cultures and languages, for them to get acquainted with each other, work together, achieve common goals, and mutual understanding. This development did not proceed in isolation from the general processes in the country. As well as outside its walls, the ASS lived through a campaign against cosmopolitanism, which resulted in persecution of Jewish professors. At the same time, some Jews, like people of other nationalities, were able to make memorable careers at the Academy

Armed conflicts of the 20th century provide food for thought about how wars arise and how they end. A key moment in the onset of peace is the cessation of hostilities, but peace is not a single event, but a process. The restoration of former normality entails the development of multidirectional and multi-speed social processes affecting diplomatic relations, economic ties, and humanitarian issues between states – adversaries in war. The author concludes that for the USSR to fully normalize relations with West Germany, which declared itself the successor to the Reich, more than ten years would have to pass before the embassies could be exchanged, and up to half a century before ordinary people could choose their country of residence

The institution of registration, which existed in the USSR and was abolished in Russia in 1993, is a historical phenomenon that had serfdom as a precursor in the Russian Empire and a ban on leaving their places of residence without notifying the authorities for those peoples of the country to whom serfdom did not apply. The author considers this institution in its connection with another important socio-political and economic phenomenon — the institution of ownership of residential premises. It is concluded that strict regulations to live only where the state defined a person could be implemented in conditions of state ownership of housing. Registration (like its predecessors) served as a universal tool for controlling tax collection, the use of labor resources, and migration regulation. Its abolition is the end of a great civilizational cycle of development, which was reflected in the relations of the subject and the sovereign, the citizen and the state. The change in the methods of this control testified to the transformation of the very nature of the state. Nowadays, new social and information technologies are coming to the fore, ensuring effective control of the government over the citizen

The article deals with the development of the Institute (since 1976 — Academy) of Social Sciences (AON) under the Central Committee of the Socialist United Party of Germany (SED) from 1951 to 1990. It studies a daily work to form a team of teachers and staff and to train graduate students and students for the ruling party of the GDR. The AON at the SED Central Committee is seen as an institution to raise the elite of socialist society. Based on the works of German and Soviet historians, the article makes a conclusion on the positional (official) type of these elite, which was inherent in other socialist countries, primarily the USSR. On the example of the Institute (Academy), the article shows how the university management developed the system of comprehensive control over the activities of teachers and graduate students. This system included detailed curricula, lecture notes, development of practical classes, and control of postgraduate students' notes. Important forms of control were preliminary discussions of conference presentations and publications of lecturers. The departments conducted daily supervision of the teaching stuff, and the library played a great role in this, with its record of books on loan. The leaders of the university, Lene Berg and Otto Rheingold created and maintained this system. They both were virtually unchanged throughout the history of the country. Besides, Otto Rheingold was the Director, and later the Rector, of the Institute (Academy) for almost 38 years. The article concludes that the elite of the socialist GDR (unlike other historical types of elite) was not an idle class in the full sense, as presented in Thorstein Veblen's theory. On the contrary, this elite had to prove its necessity day in and day out in order to keep its position, to demonstrate its adherence to Marxist-Leninist ideology and to the leadership of the university and the Party, and to work to prove its own worthiness. This played its role in 1989—1990, when members of the SED and, in particular, teachers of the Academy of Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED lost their privileges and were not in demand in the academic and educational community of united Germany. The study used the materials of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History and the Federal Archive of Germany, most of these materials are introduced into the research turnover for the first time

The article, based on the materials of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, examines the activities of the Academy of Social Sciences (AON) of the CPSU Central Committee, an educational organization that was at the center of the system of party training in the USSR after the Great Patriotic War, which had a number of privileges and at the same time helped to critically understand reality. The greatest privilege of professors and graduate students at the AON of the CPSU Central Committee was the ability to access information of a classified nature and to participate in international exchanges. These two sides of the Academy's activity are considered in the article. The author concludes that in the conditions of the post-war development © Иларионова Т. С., 2023 17 ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ НЕМАТЕРИАЛЬНОГО НАСЛЕДИЯ of the USSR was significantly expanded circle of people who had an idea of the socialist reality and the international situation and contributed to the change of mindsets in the Soviet society