Papers by Tobias Rupprecht
Russian History, 2023
While Mikhail Gorbachev opened a door for a possible democratic transformation of the Soviet Unio... more While Mikhail Gorbachev opened a door for a possible democratic transformation of the Soviet Union, the economic and financial policies of his Perestroika led to state collapse. Those who reproach him for not having a coherent concept of economic reform often point to Deng Xiaoping, whose ostensibly more clear-eyed vision led China to
prosper. Yet on a conceptual level, Gorbachev’s economic and legal arrangements were very similar to Deng’s; both drew on the domestic and international intellectual repertoires of market socialism. It was their political implementation under fundamentally different political, economic and social conditions that led to economic catastrophe in the USSR and to economic growth in the People’s Republic. A ‘Chinese path’ in the Soviet Union, including the application of political violence, may have preserved one-party dictatorship – but would not have provided the basis for an economic upswing. Gorbachev should be given great credit for rejecting such authoritarian
market reforms.
in: Quinn Slobodian, Dieter Plehwe (ed.): Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South. Verso 2022, p. 109-138
Cluster of Excellence 'Contestations of the Liberal Script' 1 'Neoliberalizm' has become a popula... more Cluster of Excellence 'Contestations of the Liberal Script' 1 'Neoliberalizm' has become a popular slur for free-markets and for the dominance of economics over politics in contemporary Russia. Commentators from both sides of the political spectrum have used it to criticise what they see as Western-inspired reforms under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. The left has also attached the label to the ensuing governments, claiming that 'neoliberalism has been and remains an organic part of the Putin regime.' 2 Anti-Western nationalists by contrast have triumphantly declared it a thing of the past: 'The neo-liberal paradigm was exhausted by the 2008 crisis and never recovered.', proclaimed Vladimir Yakunin, a long-term associate of President Vladimir Putin. 3 Again influential dirigiste economists have been praising the success of gradual state-led reforms in Deng Xiaoping's China as opposed to the neoliberalism allegedly imposed on Russia by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 4 This anti-neoliberal rhetoric is in line with notions around the world that reject what is seen as Anglo-American imposed anti-statism and laissez-faire capitalism. 'When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989,' goes a fairly representative view of contemporary observers and early academic assessments, 'there was an army of committed, international economic liberals reared in the Hayekian tradition, armed with clipboards and portable phones, waiting to move into Eastern Europe and the disintegrating Soviet Union to convert their ailing economies.' 5 Such notions of 'neoliberalism' as an anti-state dogma have over the last years been questioned by intellectual historians and economic sociologists. Neoliberal ideas, they claim, are better explained by emphasising their notions of a strong state, and sometimes international governance as well as legal and monetary arrangements, to create and defend free markets and liberal institutions from potentially anti-liberal national democratic majorities. 6 But, as the editors of this volume state: even in the most innovative work, the history of neoliberalism is still told as one emanating from the West. 1 I want to thank two colleagues for their very thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter: Adam Leeds, who has put forward a similar argument about the Gaidar group in his unpublished dissertation (Adam Leeds, Spectral Liberalism: On the Subjects of Political Economy in Moscow (2016), PhD Dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania), and Chris Miller, who did ground breaking work on the generation of their academic teachers (Chris Miller,
Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West, 2021
Die wirtschaftlichen Folgen des Zusammenbruchs der Sowjetunion trafen die Bevölkerung in den 1990... more Die wirtschaftlichen Folgen des Zusammenbruchs der Sowjetunion trafen die Bevölkerung in den 1990er Jahren mit voller Wucht. Verantwortlich dafür waren aber nicht in erster Linie die liberalen Reformen der Jelzin-Zeit, sondern die schleppenden Maßnahmen unter Gorbatschow. Die Ursachen für die soziale Misere und die sinkende Lebenserwartung reichen bis in die 1970er Jahre zurück. Dies hindert die gegenwärtige russische Regierung nicht daran, die Erinnerung an die 1990er für ihren antiwestlichen und antiliberalen Kurs zu instrumentalisieren.
Global Perspectives, 2020
Neoliberalism was a global spectrum of ideas on how to create and preserve free markets in an age... more Neoliberalism was a global spectrum of ideas on how to create and preserve free markets in an age of popular sovereignty. A notion of a powerful state to create the institutions and mentalities needed for a liberal market society, and—if need be—to fend off potentially antiliberal democratic majorities characterized neoliberal ideas far more than antistate laissez-faire economics or apolitical technocratic visions. The article presents historical evidence from Chile and Russia from the 1960s to the 1990s to make the case that global varieties of neoliberal ideas were created in different local contexts. These ideas were not imposed or imported from without; they emerged from domestic intellectual trajectories and in engagement with local political and economic conditions before their carriers connected to other, both Western and “peripheral,” varieties of neoliberalism. Actual economic reforms undertaken in these countries were not a wholesale implementation of a neoliberal agenda or manifestations of a globally hegemonic “governmentality”; rather, they were the outcome of multiple ideational influences and, more crucially, the result of domestic political power play.
Journal of Modern European History, 2020
The '1989'-inspired liberal enthusiasm about Eastern Europe's democratisation has led to an overe... more The '1989'-inspired liberal enthusiasm about Eastern Europe's democratisation has led to an overestimation of the efficacy of liberal ideas, and to a blotting-out of decidedly illiberal strands of political thought, in the region both during and after the end of Communist rule. One such strand was a remarkable interest in different aspects of the Chilean transformation from socialism to liberal democracy via authoritarianism across (post-)socialist Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Based on reform debates from Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia, this article argues that this fascination with the military dictator Augusto Pinochet is an indicator for widespread authoritarian visions among various political and intellectual elites during the transition period. For them, Pinochet served as a code and source of inspiration for a non-democratic path to an efficient economy. Before 1989, this path was laid out under the tutelage of a de-ideologised authoritarian Communist Party. After the end of planned economies and through the 1990s, the 'Chilean model' was used by anti-communists and liberal economists across the region as a source of legitimacy in their internal struggle against opponents of their reform ideas.
from: Matthias Middell (ed.): The Practice of Global History. European Perspectives. Bloomsbury 2020
This paper, co-written by James Mark and Tobias Rupprecht, discusses the changing role of the soc... more This paper, co-written by James Mark and Tobias Rupprecht, discusses the changing role of the socialist world in 'global history'. It explores the ways in which the absence of socialist states, especially Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, from narratives of modern globalisation is currently being challenged, and it suggests a number of approaches that might be developed in the future.
Global Society, 2019
Augusto Pinochet, comandante-en-jefe of the Chilean Army, was an avid global traveller in the 199... more Augusto Pinochet, comandante-en-jefe of the Chilean Army, was an avid global traveller in the 1990s. As the former military dictator had developed into a potent symbol of Cold War anti-communism, authoritarianism, and market radicalism, his trips across Latin America, East Asia, Southern Africa, continental Europe, and to the United Kingdom usually made a great stir. This article looks at public reactions, political debates, and legal consequences that were caused by Pinochet’s appearance. It argues that different attitudes towards the Chilean visitor reflected how local groups positioned and envisioned themselves in the transformative period around 1989. Drawing on documents from the Chilean Foreign Ministry, interviews with Chilean generals, and newspaper coverage from four continents, it demonstrates that many anti-communists as well as liberal economists did not see Pinochet as a representative of a criminal past. Rather, his “Chilean model” had become a source of legitimacy of an authoritarian path of modernisation.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2018
Russia and Ethiopia, both multiethnic empires with traditionally orthodox Christian ruling elites... more Russia and Ethiopia, both multiethnic empires with traditionally orthodox Christian ruling elites, from the nineteenth century developed a special relationship that outlived changing geopolitical and ideological constellations. Russians were fascinated with what they saw as exotic brothers in the faith, and Ethiopians took advantage of Russian help and were inspired by various features of modern Russian statecraft. This article examines contacts and interactions between the elites of these two distant countries, and the changing relations between authoritarian states and Orthodox churches from the age of European imperialism to the end of the Cold War. It argues that religio-ethnic identities and institutionalized religion have grounded tenacious visions of global political order. Orthodoxy was the spiritual basis of an early anti-Western type of globalization, and was subsequently coopted by states with radically secular ideologies as an effective means of mass mobilization and control.
Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World, ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, Palgrave, 2018
This contribution examines commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil dur... more This contribution examines commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil during the Cold War. Transforming its image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR from the mid-1950s, instead, presented itself as a non-Western role model for quick industrial modernisation. To many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from Presidents Kubitschek to Goulart, the Soviet Union indeed served as an inspiration for fast development and industrialisation and it helped them to pursue an independent foreign policy and thus expand Brazil’s influence in the world. Contacts with the Soviet Union were one of the justifications of the military putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. But the new military leaders, too, had their own interests in and surprisingly good relations with the stagnating Soviet Union. This cross-ideological agreement was based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain—and also on the popularity of Brazilian popular culture in the Soviet Union. Impulses for international economic and political integration and cultural exchange in the second half of the twentieth century, it is argued here, were not limited to the spread of Western European and North American ideas of internationalism and globalisation. Cold War contacts between Brazil and the Soviet Union laid the groundwork for today’s collaboration of the two states within the BRICS group of emerging economies.
The Cambridge History of Communism. Cambridge University Press, 2017
The collapse of socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe was
a turning point in Europ... more The collapse of socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe was
a turning point in European history. What is often referred to by the shorthand “1989” significantly accelerated a process of the reintegration of a continent divided by the Cold War. Yet this regional transformation was also part of larger world-historical developments. Europe’s “1989” extended the processes of democratization that had taken place in Southern Europe in the 1970s, and in Southeast Asia and Latin America
in the 1980s; it marked an acceleration of globalization and the neoliberal restructuring of economies that had begun just over a decade earlier; and it was the end of a longer-term process of imperial disintegration that stretched across the twentieth century.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2016
Numerous references to the Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet run through Soviet and Russ... more Numerous references to the Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet run through Soviet and Russian political discourse from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Official representations of Pinochet, a carefully constructed bogeyman of Soviet domestic and foreign propaganda, helped drive a wedge between Soviet dissidents and Western leftist intellectuals. Citizens of the late Soviet Union, however, creatively adapted and inverted the image of Pinochet to express their cynical contempt for their state’s ideology. From the late 1980s, a veritable cult of the Communist-slayer developed among some of Russia’s new political, cultural and economic elites. His combination of authoritarian rule and a free market economy seemed to many the most viable means to overcome, once and for all, what they perceived as the remnants of a totalitarian system with an abysmal economic performance. Following the traces of Pinochet‘s perception in Russia opens up a number of lines of inquiry into its contemporary history as it recalls both the constantly failing attempts at economic reforms in the late Soviet Union and the tragic history of Russian liberalism. The Chilean lessons for Russian reformers also challenge a Westernisation paradigm that has long dominated transformation studies of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.
Неприкосновенный запас, 2016
Известно, что царская Россия не участвовала в европейской схватке за Африку в конце XIX века. Мен... more Известно, что царская Россия не участвовала в европейской схватке за Африку в конце XIX века. Менее известно, что у Российской империи в то время завязались особые отношения с Эфиопией, едва ли не единственной в Африке страной, не захваченной какой-либо иноземной империей. Сохранить независимость Эфиопии удалось не без некоторой помощи из Санкт-Петербурга. Эфиопия привлекала внимание российских политиков и части русского православного духовенства. Ее близость к Красному морю и Ближнему Востоку, ее положение между Северной и Юго-Восточной Африкой являлись стратегическим активом в геополитической игре против Британской империи. К тому же многие верующие испытывали чувство солидарности с теми, кого воспринимали в качестве православных братьев на далеком Африканском Роге.
in: Jan Hansen, Frank Reichherzer, Christian Helm: Making Sense of the Americas. How Protest Related to America in the 1980s and Beyond, 2015
"Soviet Avant-garde Art in the Uzbek Province
The Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzb... more "Soviet Avant-garde Art in the Uzbek Province
The Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan is known as the scene of an ecological disaster of global proportion: the desiccation of the Aral Sea. Less well known is that a first-rate cultural treasure is to be found in Nukus, the autonomous republic’s capital: the republic’s State Art Museum has one of the world’s finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art. The ca. 15,000 paintings that museum founder Igor
Savitskii collected in secret from throughout the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s tell the story of a generation of artists who fell victim – often physically – to Stalin’s cultural policies, who remained banned even after Stalin’s death, and who were only snatched from oblivion by Savitskii."
La Guerra fredda, a quanto pare, è ormai passata alla storia. I vecchi dibattiti sulle origini, l... more La Guerra fredda, a quanto pare, è ormai passata alla storia. I vecchi dibattiti sulle origini, le cause o le responsabilità, la durata e il declino, appaiono superati. We now know è il titolo molto discusso dello studio di John Gaddis del 1997 sulla storia della Guerra fredda 1 . Gaddis ha ragione. È improbabile che nuove fonti possano portare alla luce qualcosa in grado di cambiare in maniera radicale i modi di confrontarsi con la Guerra fredda, sebbene il flusso delle pubblicazioni di nuovi documenti prosegua ininterrotto e possa riservare ancora sorprese. Oggi troviamo le vestigia della Guerra fredda nei musei: lo storico Justinian Jampol ha creato un «gabinetto delle meraviglie» della Rdt, unico nel suo genere, sulla costa occidentale americana e si sta progettando un museo della Guerra fredda a Berlino, la sua città simbolo, in sostitu-zione dei vari luoghi della memoria pubblici e privati proliferati lungo l'ex-muro 2 . Eppure, la storia della Guerra fredda non è affatto conclusa: al contrario, è uno dei campi di ricerca più vivaci della storiografia contemporaneistica europea e mondiale e non è più relegata all'analisi delle azioni e delle reazioni di grandi uomini di stato o ai dibattiti strategici tra i generali ai posti di comando. Viceversa, le ultime ricerche mostrano una pluralità di approcci e un ampliamento delle prospettive metodologiche e degli orizzonti geografici. In altre parole: se oggi siamo in grado di conoscere i fatti, il lavoro interpretativo è solo all'inizio. Come ha sottolineato Melvyn Leffler nella sua brillante recensione del libro di Gaddis: «è probabile che la storia della Guerra fredda diventi più controversa nel momento in cui diventa più interessante e complessa. La
This article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War History by examining commo... more This article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War History by examining commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. After outlining the common characteristics of both states around 1960, it analyses the cultural diplomacy of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union towards Brazil. Transforming its hitherto prevailing image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR now represented itself as a role model for the quick industrialisation of the economy and education of the masses. Many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from Presidents Kubitschek to Goulart shared with the Soviets an interest in what is called here Socialist High Modernity. Contacts with the Soviet Union were a chief reason for the putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. But the new military leaders also had their own interests in and surprisingly good relations with the stagnating Soviet Union – again based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain. Eschewing teleological interpretations of the period and exploring the ideational basis of actors in the conflict, this shared history – based on new documents from Moscow archives and recently declassified sources from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry – aims to contribute not only to Cold War historiography, but also to link it to the debates on Global History, which have lately neglected both Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Jan 1, 2010
"Until recently, research in the field of Soviet social history on the one side and Cold War hist... more "Until recently, research in the field of Soviet social history on the one side and Cold War historiography on the other side went separate ways. Experts on the Soviet Union focused on the inner history of primarily Stalinism, whereas diplomatic and military historians dominated Cold War research with a strong bias for the Western perspective.
This research reports seeks to give an overview of contemporary scholarship that tries to overcome that divide, outlining new trajectories and pointing at potential backlogs.
In a first step, it presents a number of new monographs on the Cold War and asks to which extent they incorporate the Soviet point of view and social historical phenomena of the so called home front of the Cold War. Most research on the Cold War now uses a multiperspective approach, it gives analytical room also to actors on the Soviet and Third World side of the conflict, it takes their ideological mindsets seriously and it has discovered cultural diplomacy as a meaningful source to reconstruct them. Repercussions on Soviet society beyond political decision makers and party ideologues, however, are still largely absent from most Cold War monographs.
The second paragraph then changes perspectives, assembling recent literature from historians of the Soviet Union who have transnationally broadened their view and analysed aspects of relations between the Soviet Union and the (Third) World. While most work is still traditional diplomatic history, there is also a tendency towards an examination of individual and group interactions across the Iron Curtain, and of Soviet perceptions of the world abroad through modern media and literature.
A last paragraph finally discusses the contribution a transnationally amended Soviet history could make to the debate on global history. The Soviet path to modernity did not happen in a completely sealed-off world, it shared indeed many phenomena with the Western one. At the same time, a global history of the second half of the 20th century needs to consider the world wide fascination for and fear of the Soviet economic and social project."
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Papers by Tobias Rupprecht
prosper. Yet on a conceptual level, Gorbachev’s economic and legal arrangements were very similar to Deng’s; both drew on the domestic and international intellectual repertoires of market socialism. It was their political implementation under fundamentally different political, economic and social conditions that led to economic catastrophe in the USSR and to economic growth in the People’s Republic. A ‘Chinese path’ in the Soviet Union, including the application of political violence, may have preserved one-party dictatorship – but would not have provided the basis for an economic upswing. Gorbachev should be given great credit for rejecting such authoritarian
market reforms.
a turning point in European history. What is often referred to by the shorthand “1989” significantly accelerated a process of the reintegration of a continent divided by the Cold War. Yet this regional transformation was also part of larger world-historical developments. Europe’s “1989” extended the processes of democratization that had taken place in Southern Europe in the 1970s, and in Southeast Asia and Latin America
in the 1980s; it marked an acceleration of globalization and the neoliberal restructuring of economies that had begun just over a decade earlier; and it was the end of a longer-term process of imperial disintegration that stretched across the twentieth century.
The Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan is known as the scene of an ecological disaster of global proportion: the desiccation of the Aral Sea. Less well known is that a first-rate cultural treasure is to be found in Nukus, the autonomous republic’s capital: the republic’s State Art Museum has one of the world’s finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art. The ca. 15,000 paintings that museum founder Igor
Savitskii collected in secret from throughout the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s tell the story of a generation of artists who fell victim – often physically – to Stalin’s cultural policies, who remained banned even after Stalin’s death, and who were only snatched from oblivion by Savitskii."
This research reports seeks to give an overview of contemporary scholarship that tries to overcome that divide, outlining new trajectories and pointing at potential backlogs.
In a first step, it presents a number of new monographs on the Cold War and asks to which extent they incorporate the Soviet point of view and social historical phenomena of the so called home front of the Cold War. Most research on the Cold War now uses a multiperspective approach, it gives analytical room also to actors on the Soviet and Third World side of the conflict, it takes their ideological mindsets seriously and it has discovered cultural diplomacy as a meaningful source to reconstruct them. Repercussions on Soviet society beyond political decision makers and party ideologues, however, are still largely absent from most Cold War monographs.
The second paragraph then changes perspectives, assembling recent literature from historians of the Soviet Union who have transnationally broadened their view and analysed aspects of relations between the Soviet Union and the (Third) World. While most work is still traditional diplomatic history, there is also a tendency towards an examination of individual and group interactions across the Iron Curtain, and of Soviet perceptions of the world abroad through modern media and literature.
A last paragraph finally discusses the contribution a transnationally amended Soviet history could make to the debate on global history. The Soviet path to modernity did not happen in a completely sealed-off world, it shared indeed many phenomena with the Western one. At the same time, a global history of the second half of the 20th century needs to consider the world wide fascination for and fear of the Soviet economic and social project."
prosper. Yet on a conceptual level, Gorbachev’s economic and legal arrangements were very similar to Deng’s; both drew on the domestic and international intellectual repertoires of market socialism. It was their political implementation under fundamentally different political, economic and social conditions that led to economic catastrophe in the USSR and to economic growth in the People’s Republic. A ‘Chinese path’ in the Soviet Union, including the application of political violence, may have preserved one-party dictatorship – but would not have provided the basis for an economic upswing. Gorbachev should be given great credit for rejecting such authoritarian
market reforms.
a turning point in European history. What is often referred to by the shorthand “1989” significantly accelerated a process of the reintegration of a continent divided by the Cold War. Yet this regional transformation was also part of larger world-historical developments. Europe’s “1989” extended the processes of democratization that had taken place in Southern Europe in the 1970s, and in Southeast Asia and Latin America
in the 1980s; it marked an acceleration of globalization and the neoliberal restructuring of economies that had begun just over a decade earlier; and it was the end of a longer-term process of imperial disintegration that stretched across the twentieth century.
The Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan is known as the scene of an ecological disaster of global proportion: the desiccation of the Aral Sea. Less well known is that a first-rate cultural treasure is to be found in Nukus, the autonomous republic’s capital: the republic’s State Art Museum has one of the world’s finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art. The ca. 15,000 paintings that museum founder Igor
Savitskii collected in secret from throughout the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s tell the story of a generation of artists who fell victim – often physically – to Stalin’s cultural policies, who remained banned even after Stalin’s death, and who were only snatched from oblivion by Savitskii."
This research reports seeks to give an overview of contemporary scholarship that tries to overcome that divide, outlining new trajectories and pointing at potential backlogs.
In a first step, it presents a number of new monographs on the Cold War and asks to which extent they incorporate the Soviet point of view and social historical phenomena of the so called home front of the Cold War. Most research on the Cold War now uses a multiperspective approach, it gives analytical room also to actors on the Soviet and Third World side of the conflict, it takes their ideological mindsets seriously and it has discovered cultural diplomacy as a meaningful source to reconstruct them. Repercussions on Soviet society beyond political decision makers and party ideologues, however, are still largely absent from most Cold War monographs.
The second paragraph then changes perspectives, assembling recent literature from historians of the Soviet Union who have transnationally broadened their view and analysed aspects of relations between the Soviet Union and the (Third) World. While most work is still traditional diplomatic history, there is also a tendency towards an examination of individual and group interactions across the Iron Curtain, and of Soviet perceptions of the world abroad through modern media and literature.
A last paragraph finally discusses the contribution a transnationally amended Soviet history could make to the debate on global history. The Soviet path to modernity did not happen in a completely sealed-off world, it shared indeed many phenomena with the Western one. At the same time, a global history of the second half of the 20th century needs to consider the world wide fascination for and fear of the Soviet economic and social project."