“Soviet Globalism: Theory and Practice of the World Socialist System in 1950s — 1970s”: The Round Table Discussion in the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The article comprises papers presented at the roundtable “Soviet globalism: theory and practice of the world socialist system from the 1950s to the 1970s” conducted at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences on May 19, 2017 within the frames of a new research project on the history of the “world system of socialism”. It unites new approaches to the discipline (Mikhail Lipkin, Viacheslav Nekrasov), historiography and terminology studies (Samuel Volfson, Artem Ulunyan) and new archival evidence from unilateral, bilateral and multilateral perspectives (Teimur Dzhalilov, Anna Gladysheva, Nikita Pivovarov, Irina Aggeeva, Alessandro Salacone, Eugeny Osipov). Following the new recently declassified sources from the Russian, West and East European archives and using global history tools, it opens a serious discussion on the role of economic strategy in competition between socialist and capitalist systems and searches for an answer to the question of why China won while the USSR lost after a several waves of inner reforms and a final shift towards economic détente with the West in the middle of 1970s.