Archival documents from Russia, which are becoming more accessible, help to provide a more accurate accounts of Iran's political past. Based on Soviet documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, as well additional primary and secondary sources in various languages, the focus of this article is on the challenges and obstacles which the Tudeh Party faced from the British and their proxies in Iran during the Allied occupation of Iran in Second World War (thus creating Tudeh's ‘British Problem’). The article delves not only on describing and analyzing those challenges and obstacles, but also on the way the Tudeh was able to overcome them, and its political breakthrough and success in the Fourteenth Majlis elections and later in introducing three of its members into Qavam's coalition government. Faced with such successes of the Tudeh, and worried about the future of their own interests in Iran, and especially the oil installations of the AIOC, the British sought American assistance. According to the Soviet view, it was only through an Anglo-American cooperation that Tudeh's political rise in Iran was checked.

The North Korean police were arguably one of the most important organisations in liberated North Korea. It was instrumental in stabilising the North Korean society and eventually became one of the backbones for both the new North Korean regime and its military force. Scholars of different political orientation have attempted to reconstruct its early history leading to a set of views ranging from the “traditionalist” sovietisation concept to the more contemporary “revisionist” reconstruction that portrayed it as the cooperation of North Korean elites with the Soviet authorities in their bid for the control over the politics and the military, in which the Soviets merely played the supporting role. Drawing from the Soviet archival documents, this paper presents a third perspective, arguing that initially, the Soviet military administration in North Korea did not pursue any clear-cut political goals. On the contrary, the Soviet administration initially viewed North Koreans with distrust, making Soviets constantly conduct direct interventions to prevent North Korean radicals from using the police in their political struggle.

In 2011, a monument commemorating a group of Polish academics killed during the Nazi occupation was unveiled at the site of their death in L΄viv, presently a Ukrainian city. This event became the pinnacle of a commemoration that had developed quite autonomously on both sides of the redrawn Polish-(Soviet)Ukrainian border. The commemorative project and memory event underpinning it are especially interesting owing to the partial recuperation of links with the prewar local genealogies of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. This article explores how a special historic occurrence that took place in wartime L΄viv/Lwów became an issue of continual political significance invested with different truth, originality, and identity claims in Poland and Ukraine. The authors focus on various actors who managed to transform memory about the murdered academics into a public commemorative project and elevate the role of translocal links in the successful realization of the commemorative initiative in question. The concluding part summarizes principal lessons pertaining to commemoration of perished population groups in east-central European borderlands that might be drawn on the basis of the discussed case.

In 1941, Sergei Eisenstein had a decision to make. Iosif Stalin commissioned him to make a film about Ivan the Terrible, and in the months that followed he vacillated about how to depict the bloody tyrant. The Nazi invasion in June temporarily distracted him from work on the film, but by the time he was evacuated to Alma Ata in October, Eisenstein was committed to making the defiantly unorthodox, transgressive film that we have. What changed? The bombing of Moscow in July compelled Eisenstein to reflect on his public and private responsibilities and on individualism and collectivism in ways that complicated those categories and clarified his determination to make Ivan the Terrible a serious study of political power and violence. His diary from this period contributes a first-hand account of the bombing, and shows us Eisenstein's thinking about the political implications of interior and exterior at this critical stage in his life and work. This text, unpublished and unintended for publication, gives us a voice and a spectrum of positions that we have not heard before on this key set of discourses in Soviet history.

This article shows how we can use the securitization framework to study extreme history politics. Securitization refers to a speech act or discursive process in which an actor makes a claim that some referent object, deemed worthy of survival, is existentially threatened. If successful, securitization justifies the use of extraordinary measures to counter the threat. After introducing the concept of securitization in detail, the article presents three ways in which history and securitization can be connected: history can serve as a facilitating condition of securitization; history can be explicitly used to strengthen a securitizing move; or history, or a particular interpretation of it, can be the referent object of securitization. The second half of the article is devoted to a discussion on the role of history in the securitization of national identities. Historical myths are the standard building blocks of national identities; challenging these myths can be presented as threats to the survival of the nation. The article also discusses potential forms of resistance against securitization of history/national identities. Illustrative examples from the political use of WWII history in Finland will be used to show the practical consequences of various conceptual choices.

Among his varied publications, Nuto Revelli (1919–2004) produced three collections of oral testimonies gathered from the contadini (peasants) of Piedmont: La strada del davai, Il mondo dei vinti and L’anello forte. This article argues that these collections were the product of the same specific impegno del dopo (‘obligation of afterwards’) as his initial autobiographical writings, which had arisen from his experiences as an officer on the Russian Front during the Second World War. From this premise, the article then examines the interaction of Revelli's sense of impegno del dopo with the methodology he developed. The article concludes with an assessment of Revelli's stated aims and his actual achievements.