Soviet Industry in the World Spotlight: The Domestic Dilemmas of Soviet Foreign Economic Relations, 1955–1965

The mid-1950s marked the beginning of tremendous growth in the Soviet Union's foreign economic relations. Based on archival research, this article argues that this growth masked two contradictory processes. On the one hand, Kremlin leaders encouraged ever more economic engagement with the world. On the other hand, the Soviet system discouraged industrial managers from producing for export, and it often caused precious imports to be wasted. This struggle between industry and the Kremlin over foreign trade gave impetus to the treadmill of reforms launched by the Khrushchev leadership.     

Limits of nationalist mobilization: Bromberg/Bydgoszcz in the Kaiserreich, 1900–1918

Discussions about ethnic mobilization in eastern Europe have emphasized efforts of nationalist leaders to demarcate their community from their neighbors in mixed areas where ethnic boundaries and identities were blurred. Demarcation became a common means of defining the community both geographically and culturally, a process which later facilitated the community's mobilization. In the German Empire, however, the Polish–German demarcation was already stark, since it mostly coincided with Catholic–Protestant demarcations. But while the Polish community mobilized quickly and showed great solidarity, the German community did not. Using the Bromberg/Bydgoszcz administrative district as a model, the article argues that the local German community's internal divisions limited its ability to mobilize. Germans agreed on the need for greater German community solidarity, but differed on conceptualizations of its ideal structure and form. Liberal nationalists, envisioning a more egalitarian community defined by a common ethnicity, fought with local conservatives, who were as intent on preserving their prominence within the community as they were on struggling with the Poles. Such divisions crippled local German mobilization on any scale comparable to their Polish neighbors, suggesting that an ethnic community's self-demarcation is necessary but not sufficient to ensure its mobilization.     

Supply response reconsidered: Cocoa in Western Nigeria, 1909–44

This essay uses time‐series data on cocoa plantings in Western Nigeria to re‐examine some popular conclusions about the price responsiveness of farmers in underdeveloped economies. Annual variations in the rate of planting were found to be more closely related to farmers’ income from cocoa sales than to current price. Qualitative evidence suggests that longer‐term trends in cocoa plantings were also influenced by changing opportunity costs and by the institutional structure of rural factor markets. These results cast some doubt on commonly accepted capital stock adjustment models of investment in tree crops, which assume that farmers rely heavily on forecasting future price trends when deciding how much to plant. Given the uncertainty of future crop prices, it seems more likely that farmers plant more trees when they can afford to do so, so long as opportunity costs are not prohibitive.     

Discontent and Uncertainty in the Borderlands: Soviet Moldavia and the Secret Speech 1956–1957

This article examines reactions to de-Stalinisation in Soviet Moldavia between February 1956 and March 1957. The article is based on evidence from the archives of both the former Communist Party of Moldavia and the Moldavian KGB. It highlights the uncertainty there was at local levels because of the denunciation of Stalin. Local party reports demonstrate concern about the activities of religious activists, Western propaganda, nationalism and disaffected youth. The Hungarian revolution of 1956 caused the party to change tack, and to begin a clampdown. These reports highlight that Soviet rule had very shallow roots in Moldavia.     

Disaffection and Revolts in Nigeria During the First World War, 1914–1918

In 2012, roughly 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Religious responses to the disease have ranged from condemnation of people with HIV to the development of innovative AIDS-related services. This article utilises insights from the social movement literature about collective identity, framing, resources, and opportunity structures to interrogate religious mobilisation against HIV/AIDS. It demonstrates that mobilisation cannot be divorced from factors such as state–civil society relations, Africa's dependence on foreign aid, or the continent's poverty. Religious HIV/AIDS activities must be analysed in a conceptual space between a civil society/politics approach and a service-provider/anti-politics framework. That is, religious mobilisation may at times seek to engage the public realm to shape policies, while at other times it may shun politics in its provision of services. Case studies that illustrate these themes and demonstrate the multi-faceted interactions between religion and HIV/AIDS are included.     

Restricting Russians: language and immigration laws in Soviet Latvia, 1956–1959

In 1956, a prominent faction within the leadership of Soviet Latvia, the Latvian national communists, launched two ambitious initiatives designed to redress perceived Stalinist Russification polices – a language law and residency restrictions. This article examines and evaluates these two policies and asks if they were part of a “Latvianization” program that deliberately targeted Russians for denial of residency permits and required Russians to gain Latvian-language competency within a two-year timeframe or face the threat of dismissal. In an effort to restore the primacy of the Latvian language, the national communists created a law enforcing knowledge of Latvian and Russian for Communist Party and government functionaries and service sector personnel. Using the Soviet legal system, the national communists also attempted to halt the influx of predominantly Slavic immigration to the Latvian capital, Riga. By instituting passport restrictions on settling in the city, the national communists sought to limit Slavic migration in order to maintain Riga’s Latvian character and reduce pressure on the city’s housing supply and municipal services. Existing studies deem passport restrictions in other Soviet cities a failure. The author argues, however, that the national communists’ scheme was generally successful, dramatically curbing migration to Riga during its operation.     

Painting between the lines: the Cape Verdean community of Colonial Dakar, 1920–1945

From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, Cape Verdean immigrants to Dakar, colonial capital of French West Africa, became a small but important community in terms of significance in both the urban economy and the colonial framework of race and identity. They occupied important labor niches valuable to the colonizer such as painting and domestic work and attached those fields to a unique identity to which only they belonged. Able to capitalize on the ambiguity inherent to colonial race and identity policies, Cape Verdeans bridged categories common to state policies – particularly “foreign” and “native” – in ways not adequately captured by the concept of intermediaries often employed in examinations of immigrant populations to West Africa. Their insertion in Dakar reveals the permeability of such colonial concepts as well as the opportunities immigrants made in town.