Abstract: The subject of the author's research is the yet unstudied aspects of the transnational history of the intelligence services of the USSR and the GDR in the sphere of controlling the educational system of the East German students in the Soviet Union: their mutual collaboration, the area of operation of the Stasi, the methods of recruitment and mobilisation of unofficial informers, and the conflict areas of the Socialist integration. On the basis of material from Russian and German archives, the author reconstructs the strategies of assessing reality and behavioural practice of the students, the reasons for collaborating with intelligence services, and the attempts to use uncontrolled niches for private benefit. On the methodological plan the article presents an interdisciplinary study, created at the intersection of new political, transnational, and social history, historical anthropology, and sociology of international relations. The student delegation became a Stasi channel, securing the effect of having a limited presence on the territory of the governing country, as well as a possibility to have an indirect influence on the internal affairs of the Soviet Union: the organisation of the educational process and control over Soviet and international students, and also over representatives of West Germany (entrepreneurs, scholars, tourists). The author notes the pragmatic flexibility of the intelligence services' discourse on interagency with respect to official propaganda words, and also confirms the fruitfulness of the refusal to universally consider all the agents of the Stasi as ingrained servants of dictatorship in favour of a differentiated approach to analysing the motives for collaborating with secret services.

Abstract: This review presents a critical analysis of A. A. Tikhomirov’s newest study dedicated to the cult of Stalin in Eastern Germany during the formation period of party and government structures. The review’s author notes that the monograph is a worthy contribution to the current discussions regarding the transnational measurement of late Stalinism history, to the reconstruction of the peripheries of the Soviet empire’s symbolic mechanisms of assimilation, and to the study of the working specifics of the “discourse dictatorship” and (self)creation of “dictatorial subject”. The key points of the analysis are the specifics behind the creation of Stalinist symbolic space in Central and Eastern Europe, its homogenisation and encapsulation, as well as the role of government, group, and individual actors. The most significant conclusions the author comes to are his comments on the decisive role of the “patriarch generation”, which lived for a long time in Soviet emigration and thoroughly studied the rules of the Soviet discourse games and sought to follow them for securing and strengthening their own power, and on the mutual beneficial creation of a structure to subordinate the peripheries to the centre of the empire. The reviewer criticises the part of the author’s argument that is based on initially ideologised materials of the West German Social Democratic Party of Germany, logical contradictions, and unbalanced national and transnational perspectives. Valuating positively the book author’s research overall, the reviewer notes possible direction for its continuation as a detailed analysis of the competition of the imperial peripheries between themselves before of Moscow regarding questions of the correct symbolisation of the cult community.