Sociocultural Aspect of the Policy of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany as a Topical Issue of Area Studies

Abstract

The article analyzes the dynamics of the development of sociocultural area studies as a branch of knowledge, and chronologizes this process with a separate indication of features of its three stages. The author focuses on the insufficiency of sources and on the attempts of researchers to deal with this problem. The second part of the article demonstrates the potential of the documents of the Soviet military administration in Germany as a source for sociocultural studies of interaction between Germany and the USSR after the war. The author dwells on the disclosure of the SMAG documents drawing on his own experience as well. The article includes the main documents available in the State archive of the Russian Federation. The author concludes that sociocultural studies are developing in accordance with the basic interdisciplinary laws and tendencies in the human sciences. The documents of the SMAG provide considerable opportunities for sociocultural analysis in order to more thoroughly understand the features of intercultural cooperation between Germany and the USSR in 1945–1949.

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