Modern Historiography of the Establishment of the Soviet Occupation Regime in Germany (1945–1949)

Abstract

There is a lack of research specifically addressing the processes of establishment by Soviet functionaries, their assistants from among the German anti-fascists and civilians of the occupation regime on the German territories from the Bay of Lübeck to the Thuringia–Bavaria border in the west. The author points out that when performing such studies, one should consider the work of the abovementioned groups of people in all possible aspects. Since the chronological framework of the organization of the Soviet occupation regime has not been established in historiography, the author determines its upper and lower boundaries while providing four arguments in favour of his reasoning. Scholars distinguish two historiographic stages in the study of the activities of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD); the author introduces a new classification and elaborates on the importance of the modern stage for an objective consideration of the problems in question. The paper describes the activities of individual structural units of SMAD and the Group of Soviet Occupation Forces in Germany based on a summary analysis of some modern (since 1991) Russian and foreign collected papers and historiographic sources on the organizational work in the course of establishing the Soviet occupation regime on the territory of a number of former administrative units of the German Reich that were included in the Soviet occupation zone. The use of the typological historical method allowed the author to systematize a significant amount of research papers dealing with certain fundamental aspects of the occupation regime: political and legal, ideological and propagandistic, economic, sociocultural, and educational. The author notes that the painstaking work of Soviet functionaries and their assistants yielded mostly poor results.