Violence After Stalin: Institutions, Practices, and Everyday Life in the Soviet Bloc 1953-1989

This volume by an international group of historians presents case studies on the use and types of physical violence in the USSR and Moscow's European satellite states after the death of Joseph Stalin. While communist rule until 1953 was characterized by repression and mass-terror, violence came to play a lesser role under Stalin's successors. Within the methodological approach of Neue Gewaltforschung ("New Research on Violence"), the papers gathered in this collection present novel insights into the motives and nature of physical violence—both in the public and private realms—during the last decades of state socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The studies cover such crucial subjects as the GULag, war and the military, as well as childhood and sexual violence.