Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan

This impeccably deliberate oral history focuses on the identities of the late Soviet officer class as it experienced the collapse of the socialist experiment. The result is a unique contribution that showcases how the USSR’s most fervent supporters remain tinged with that regime’s anti-capitalist and supra-nationalist mission even today. While such a conclusion is perhaps unsurprising, Michael Westrate’s wealth of oral testimony from Kharkiv leaves the reader with a vital, new sense of how those in Ukraine’s east (and most likely many other places across the former Soviet space) make sense of the last thirty years for themselves. Following introductory chapters outlining the author’s methodology and Kharkiv’s history, the heart of the analysis is found in the third chapter, entitled ‘Men and the Military’. Based on seventy-five interviews—the majority with the former officers of that city’s now defunct Higher Academy for (Air Defence) Radio Engineering (VIRTA in its Russian-language acronym) and their families, Westrate outlines what happened once the Cold War-era party’s and military’s professional ethic ‘became to ensure progress in the international class struggle, eventually overthrowing the bourgeois international order, not merely to ensure the security of the Soviet state within that order’ (p. 70). The resulting pervasive militarisation of Soviet society fully indoctrinated the officers, with VIRTA at its pinnacle. In their crisp, unique Air Defence Forces stripes, these men held pride of place, whether on the streets of their home town or on frequent assignments abroad in Egypt or Vietnam in the effort to keep pace with the United States in the arms race

Bourgeoisie · Class conflict · Economic history · Nationalism · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Pride · Proletariat · Sociology · State (computer science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law