Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Communism and architecture – Soviet Union – History'

Defence date: 26 April 2021
Examining Board: Professor Alexander Etkind (European University Institute); Professor Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford); Professor Pavel Kolář (University of Konstanz); Professor Anatoly Pinsky (University of Helsinki)
The transnational history of the Soviet Union often goes against everything we know as citizens of the post-Soviet world. We are used to imagining the Iron Curtain as an impermeable obstacle and any meaningful connection between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world as clandestine, unofficial, and potentially subversive. But it was not always the case. I wish to open my thesis with a short dramatic exposition from the memoir of one of the protagonists of my thesis, the Soviet architect Felix Novikov: Soon [after the speech against the extravagances in architecture in 1953] the architectural bosses went abroad in search for examples worthy of emulation. The head of the Union of architects of the USSR, Pavel Abrosimov, left for Italy, Aleksandr Vlasov went to the US, Iosif Loveĭko who, in his absence became the chief architect of Moscow, left for France. After, each of them gave a talk about his impressions to the colleagues in the overcrowded lecture hall of the Central House of Architects. A year after the “historical” (without irony) speech the Party and government decree “On the elimination of extravagances in housing design and construction” appeared […] in the text of this document were such lines: “Obligate (the list of responsible organizations followed )… to be more daring in assimilation of the best achievements… of foreign construction.” The true “reconstruction” resulted in architecture that I call Soviet modernism started from this moment.”
Chapter 4 ‘Anatole Kopp: Enchanted by the Soviet' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Anatole Kopp’s town and revolution as history and a manifesto : a reactualization of Russian constructivism in the West in the 1960s' (2016) in the journal ‘Journal of Art Historiography’

Das Wort was a literary journal published by German Communist writers and fellow-travelers exiled in Moscow from 1936 to 1939. It was to be a mouthpiece for German literature in exile and to promote the Popular Front policy, which sought to unite disparate elements in non-Fascist Europe in opposition to the Nazis. Das Wort, under the editorship of German Communist writers whose close association with the Soviet Union had been well established in the previous decade, tried to provide a forum for exiled writers of various political persuasions, but was unwavering in its positive portrayal of Stalin's Soviet Union and the policies of that country. As the level of hysteria grew with the successive purges and public show trials in the Soviet Union, the journal adopted an even more eulogistic and militant attitude: any criticism or expression of doubt about Soviet policy was equated with support for Fascism. Thus the ability of the journal to contribute to the formation of a true common front in Europe to oppose Fascism was compromised from the outset by its total support for the Soviet Union. The Popular Front policy foundered on this issue, and that portion of German literature in exile which was to form the first generation of East German literature was inextricably bound to the Soviet Union well before the German Democratic Republic came in to existence.

This thesis contributes to existing discussions of Soviet subjectivity by considering how the efforts of the Party leadership and state agencies to shape personal and collective identities were mediated by the teaching of Russian classics to teenagers. It concentrates in particular on the history of literature course provided by Soviet schools for the upper years. The study addresses the following questions: (1) How was literary expression employed to instigate children's emotions and create interpretive habits as a way of inculcating a Soviet worldview? (2) What immediate effects did the methods have on teenagers? (3) What were the long-term effects of this type of indoctrination? Answering these questions required close reading of material produced by official authorities, such as methodological programmes, teachers' aids, professional journals, and textbooks for class instruction, and also of material produced by those at the receiving end of Stalinist literary instruction, including both sources contemporary to the period under scrutiny (i.e. diaries written between 1936-1941), and later autobiographical material (memoirs, oral history). I argue that for many teenagers growing up during this period, indoctrination in the classroom blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, and provided a moral compass to navigate their social environment, to judge others as well as themselves along prescribed lines, and model their lives on the precepts and slogans of the characters and authors they encountered, particularly the 19th-century radical democrats. Retrospective accounts - interviews, memoirs, and written responses to questions - expose the durability of the moral and ethical lessons derived from Russian classics and reveal the enduring Soviet emotional complex formed by this literary instruction. Investigating the impacts of the study of Russian classics on Soviet recipients, particularly from elite groups such as the city intelligentsia, my discussion highlights the political traction of the literary in, for instance, forming feelings of group belonging and strong emotional responses to differing views. I conclude with a discussion of the relation of this to long-term political effects, including the re-appraisal, in the twenty-first century, of Stalin-era teaching methodology as an effective way of instilling patriotic sentiments in students, and the legacy of Soviet perceptions and practices in the expression of personal and collective identities in the post-Soviet period.

Thesis advisor: Roberta T. Manning
Although born in Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and dying before Stalin took control of the USSR, Kafka clairvoyantly understood the full paradox of Soviet authoritarianism. His short parable “Before the Law” provides an interesting intellectual exercise for anyone wishing to study Soviet law, for in Russia it evokes tragic truth. The man who futilely attempted to reach the law is a metaphor for Russian masses seeking the same goal. Just as the doorkeeper with his air of conscious superiority and vacillating temperament mirrors the nature of Soviet rulers. The absurdity that underpins Kafka's work poignantly and painfully parallels the arbitrary ‘justice' of Stalin's rule. The man's futile search is symbolic of the many purge victims who, while wasting away in the gulags, clung to the slim hope of using legal means to exonerate themselves. Through an intellectual and visceral response, Kafka conveys the authoritarian split between the elite and the masses in Russia. No one knows how many countless Russian and Soviet citizens' lives were wasted in the same shadow of indifferent omnipotence. And we are forced to ask why the law was kept from them. And yet, what fueled the insatiable pursuit of the law in the face of certain futility? Even the Purges took place within a legal framework, as perverse as it may have been. But was Communist legality simply an oxymoron, or was there something more?
Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003
Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: History
Discipline: College Honors Program

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings.

This study concerns the sources of the revolutionary Bolshevik elite's social and ethnic origins in Late Imperial Russia. The key finding is that the Bolshevik leadership of the revolutionary years 1917--1924 was highly ethnically diverse in origin with non-Russians---Jews, Latvians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians---constituting nearly two-thirds of the elite. The 'Russian' Revolution was led primarily by elites of the empire's non-Russian national minorities. This thesis therefore considers the sources of their radicalism in the peripheries of the multinational empire.
Although the 'class' language of socialism has dominated accounts not only of the causes of the Revolution but also of the sources of Bolshevik socialism, in my view the Bolsheviks were more a response to a variety of cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic social identities than they were a response to class conflict. The appeal of a theory about class conflict does not necessarily mean that it was class conflict to which the Bolsheviks were responding; they were much more a product of the tensions of a multi-ethnic imperial state than of the alienating 'class' effects of an industrializing Russian state.
How 'peripherals' of the imperial borderlands came to espouse an ideology of the imperial 'center' is the empirical focus. Five substantive chapters on Jews, Poles and Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Transcaucasians, and Latvians, consider the sources of their radicalism by contextualizing their biographies in regional ethnopolitics and in relationships to the Tsarist state. A great attraction of Russian (Bolshevik) socialism was in what it meant for ethnopolitics in the multi-ethnic borderlands: much of the appeal lay in its secularism, its 'ecumenical' political vision, its universalism, its anti-nationalism, and in its implied commitment to "the good imperial ideal". The 'elective affinities' between individuals of different ethnic strata and Russian socialism varied across ethnic groups, and often within them. One of the key themes, therefore, is how a social and political identity is worked out within the context of a multinational empire, invoking social processes such as nationalism, assimilation, Russification, social mobility, access to provincial and imperial 'civil societies', linguistic and cultural choices, and ethnopolitical relationships.

The present study focuses on the activity of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) to promote the communist project during the so-called Thaw period in the Soviet Union (1953-1964). The term ‘communist project’ describes the complex temporal triangle in which the relevance of the present was rooted in its relationship to the heroic past and the bright future. Young people were supposed to emulate the heroism of previous generations while fighting remnants of the undesired past. This was presented as a precondition for achieving the communist future. The structure of this study reflects the chronology of the communist project. It analyzes the rhetoric used by the Young Communist League to promote the communist project and explores the strategies used to mobilize youth for building communism. The first chapter focuses on the organizational structure of the Komsomol and assesses its readiness for this task. Despite attempts to strengthen horizontal communication and control, streamline administration and reorganize its structure, the Komsomol remained hierarchal and bureaucratic. The second chapter explores the promotion of past heroism in rituals, social practices and the use of public space. The third chapter is also concerned with the past; it describes the Komsomol’s fight against ‘remnants of the past’, primarily religion and deviant behaviour such as hooliganism, heavy drinking and laziness. The final chapter focuses on the Komsomol’s attempts during the Thaw to bring about the future: its efforts in the economy, moral, political and cultural education, and the realm of leisure.

During the shift from the rule of Joseph Stalin to that of Nikita Khrushchev, people in the Soviet Union witnessed dramatic political, economic, and social changes, evident even in such private aspects of life as residential home interiors. The major architectural style of Stalin's era, known as Stalin's Empire Style, was characterized by grandeur and rich embellishments. The buildings' interiors were similarly grandiose and ornate. By endorsing this kind of design, Stalin attempted to position himself as an heir of classical traditions, to encourage respect for his regime, and to signal his power. When Nikita Khrushchev became the country's leader shortly after Stalin's death in 1953, he proclaimed that "excessive decorations" were not only unnecessary, but harmful. As a result, the standardized panel buildings produced at his initiative were defined by straight, plain lines, and were devoid of literally any architectural details that were not considered functional. These changes in Soviet architecture were reflected in interior design and furnishings: the minimalist aesthetic became their defining characteristic. The purpose of this study is to gain, through examination of existing literature, new insight into why a transition to a minimalist aesthetic was happening in the 1950s and 1960s in Soviet urban interior design. To achieve this goal, the present thesis analyzes works by contemporary scholars on the subject and examines statements the Soviet government as well as Soviet architects and interior decoration specialists made regarding the state's views on architecture and interiors during the period of 1950-1960. While research has been published that explores some aspects of this stylistic transition, the present work is unique in that it identifies and focuses on three distinct reasons for the change to minimalism in Soviet urban residential interiors under Khrushchev: the deficit of apartment space, reduction of construction costs, and ideological motives.

The Communist Party's control of Soviet literature gradually evolved from the 1920s and reached its height in the 1940s. The amount of control exerted over Soviet literature reflected the strengthening power of the Communist Party. Sources used in this thesis include speeches, articles, and resolutions of leaders in the Communist Party, novels produced by Soviet authors from the 1920s through the 1940s, and analyses of leading critics of Soviet literature and Soviet history. The thesis is structured around the political and literary developments during the periods of 1917-1924, 1924-1932, 1932-1941, and 1946-1949. The conclusion is that the Communist Party seized control of Soviet literature to disseminate Party policy, minimize dissent, and produce propaganda, not to provide an outlet for creative talent.

In the last three decades of the 19th century small groups composed of primarily skilled, male workers in Petersburg factories developed and refined a specific form of worker identity, that of the worker-intelligent. This identity was the product of a combination of an ideal conceptualisation of proletarian man derived from readings of western socialist literature and ideas introduced into the workers’ environment by members of the radical intelligenty alongside their material experience of work in the rapidly developing industries of the capital. Seeking to appropriate the ‘intelligence’ of their radical intelligentsia mentors to create ‘Russian Bebels’, from the early 1870s small groups of workers aspired to develop their own worker organisations to give voice to the specific needs, demands and assumed aspirations of the emerging working-class within an autocratic society that maintained the fiction that a specific industrial working-class did not exist. Whilst workers enthusiastically welcomed the intelligentsia as bearers of the knowledge essential to construct their own specific identity, the process of identity creation frequently led to power struggles with the intelligentsia over the latter’s role and control of knowledge. It is in the often contested relationships between workers and intelligentsia that vital clues emerge as to how workers perceived themselves and others within the worker-class. Within this contested arena the radical worker-intelligenty frequently articulated their independence from the intelligentsia who they frequently regarded as a temporary ally, essential to satisfy their initial thirst for knowledge and to fulfil certain technical tasks, but who eventually should be subordinate to the workers’ movement that workers alone were capable of leading. Although workers eagerly embraced the revolutionary ideals received from the intelligenty, these were processed and reconstructed in terms of a worker-hegemony in the revolutionary process, taking entirely literally the dictum that ‘the liberation of the workers must be a cause for the workers themselves.’ This represented the essence of the worker-intelligenty belief system and, when taken in conjunction with their conviction that the mass of workers remained ‘backward,’ incapable of effecting their own liberation, produced a strongly held belief that it was incumbent on enlightened workers to act as advocates of the whole class, irrespective of the degree to which the mass of workers conformed to their vision of the ideal revolutionary worker. These early Petersburg workers’ organisations are of historical importance as from their inception they articulated a specific ‘worker’ ideology opposed to both the political regime and emerging Russian industrial capitalism, an opposition that would subsequently be transformed in Soviet Russia into an historical narrative that presented them as a vanguard for the working-class and the precursors of the Soviet ‘new man.’ In the process of fusing of the mind of the intelligenty within the body of a worker, the first generations of worker- intelligenty consistently sought to demonstrate in practice their own revolutionary primacy. Painfully aware of the disparity between their ideal proletarian man and the reality of the ‘backwardness’ of the mass of their fellow workers, the early worker-intelligenty developed and nurtured their own particular institution - the workers’ circle, kruzhok, an institution which simultaneously reinforced their own sense of identity and worth whilst providing a space in which they could receive their necessary enlightenment from the radical intelligentsia. Rather than viewing workers as passive objects, the Petersburg worker-intelligenty was instrumental in its own creation, throughout the period under discussion acting as a revolutionary subject in its own right, to a significant extent determining the nature and content of study involving the intelligenty, establishing clear organisational frameworks to govern relationships with intelligenty groups, and, critically, seeking opportune moments to enter the public sphere and declare their presence as workers, revealing themselves as a social force to be recognised. In the historiography of the revolutionary working-class in Russia these worker-led organisations have been largely ignored or subsumed under the rubric of the name of a leading member of the radical intelligenty associated with workers’ circles, as for example in the so-called Brusnev organisation. For a long period Soviet and western historians privileged the role of the radical intelligentsia, reflecting competing ideological biases that in the case of the Soviet interpretation viewed workers as a dependent category requiring enlightenment from an external Marxist party, whilst much western research focused on ideological debates amongst intelligenty ‘leaders’ and/or incipient reformist and non- revolutionary tendencies amongst worker activists. Although in more recent time a number of historians have explored the autonomous nature of worker activism in 1905 and 1917, whilst others have explored the cultural attitudes and beliefs of workers, the first specifically worker-led organisations created by worker-intelligenty have been largely ignored. What remains missing is a study that addresses the actual historical practice of the worker-intelligenty during its formative years and how it sought to give form to its self- realisation and express its received knowledge as the advanced representative of its class. The discourse of class not only gave life to the worker-intelligenty but critically guided its first at times uncertain footsteps towards fulfilling what it had come to believe was its ‘historic’ role.

This thesis explores professional visions for the planning of everyday life during the period of developed socialism. Considering a wide range of disciplinary literature, including architecture, urban planning, design and sociology, this thesis analyses how professionals imagined residential and domestic life in an urbanised and technologically advanced socialist society. Continuing the narrative of Khrushchev’s modernising programme to reform everyday life (byt) into the post-Khrushchev period, the thesis follows professionals of the last two Soviet decades who criticised the rationalising and collectivising planning paradigm inaugurated during the preceding decades. Professionals argued that this paradigm had produced a dehumanised and alienating everyday environment in the city and the home. After setting out the theoretical framework and the historical context of developed socialism, the first empirical section addresses urban residential life. It focuses on the microdistrict planning unit to illustrate how professionals, disillusioned with functionalist planning, searched for ways to humanise the city and adapt it to the behaviours and needs of urban residents. Part two investigates shifting professional views on the home and the everyday processes associated with it, such as cooking and cleaning. No longer seen as a utilitarian space in which everyday processes transpire, the home came to be understood as a personal and emotionally resonant place. Part three focuses on material culture, investigating evolving views on consumption and aesthetics. It illustrates how professionals endeavoured to rehabilitate the object world and align it with populist preferences while nonetheless maintaining a commitment to technological and forward-looking principles. In contributing to the scholarly understanding of developed socialism, this thesis contends that the 1970s-1980s saw experts embrace individual agency and popular sentiments. This turn did not, however, signify a turn towards individualism or de-politicised malaise: professionals maintained their utopian aspirations to engineer and control everyday life.

Orientador: Caio Navarro de Toledo
Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-10T16:37:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cabrera_JoseRoberto_D.pdf: 1544985 bytes, checksum: be6a043e0d224d0065cbceec4d9f556d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008
Resumo: Esta tese apresenta o modo como o Partido Comunista do Brasil reagiu à chamada crise do socialismo e aos eventos que puseram fim à União Soviética. O PC do Brasil firmou-se historicamente como organização marxista-leninista vinculado à tradição da Internacional Comunista. Sua identidade política e ideológica consolidou-se em oposição ao chamado revisionismo contemporâneo, identificado com os rumos empreendidos na URSS após o XX Congresso do PCUS. Este processo aproximou-o das críticas do Partido Comunista Chinês e do Partido do Trabalho da Albânia. Na década de 1980 a crise soviética foi avaliada como o resultado da crescente integração da URSS no mundo capitalista e das políticas 'social-imperialistas¿ por ela aplicadas, caracterizando o regime soviético como um tipo de capitalismo de Estado. Em 1991, na medida em que a crise se expandiu sobre a Albânia, exemplo de coerência e de fidelidade ao marxismo-leninismo na opinião do PC do B, as formulações teóricas em torno do revisionismo passaram a ser reavaliadas. No seu VIII Congresso em 1992, o PC do B inovou ao criticar a experiência bolchevique. Reafirmou sua adesão ao marxismo-leninismo e ao socialismo, traçando caminho distinto de várias outras organizações comunistas pelo mundo. Durante este processo, o PC do Brasil oscilou entre uma abordagem que apontava a luta de classes como responsável fundamental das transformações operadas no interior do regime soviético, enquanto de outro lado, manifestava uma tendência economicista, situando os problemas do socialismo em torno do imperativo do desenvolvimento das forças produtivas. Em certa medida, desviou-se do debate desses temas fundamentais ou, quando o fez, tratou-os de maneira marginal, mantendo um conjunto perguntas sem respostas e submetendo constantemente as formulações teóricas às exigências da conjuntura política, potencializadas por uma institucionalização crescente no sistema político
Abstract: This thesis intend discuss the used ways by the Communist Party of Brazil (PC of B) in order to respond to the socialism¿s crisis and to the events that finished with the Soviet Union. The PC of B historically affirmed itself as a Marxist-Leninist organization tied to the International Communist tradition. Its politics and ideological identity was consolidated as opposition to the called ¿contemporary revisionism¿, at the same time the cited studied party identified itself with the USSR¿s route with was adopted after the XX Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. This process brought its position to Chinese Communist Party and the Labour Party of Albania¿s critics. In the eighties, the Soviet crisis was evaluated as a consequence of the progressive integration of the USSR in the capitalist world, and as its social-imperialists practices resulted in to characterize the Soviet regime as a model of capitalism¿s state. In 1991, the Soviet crisis has expanded to the Albania (example of coherency and loyalty to Marxism-Leninism by PC of B evaluation); as result of it, the theoretical formulations around the revisionism starting to be reevaluated. In its VIII Congress (1992), the PC do B innovated when criticized the Bolshevik¿s experience. It reaffirmed its loyalty to Marxism-Leninism and socialism, adopting particular way in opposition to several other communist organizations around the world. During its process, the PC of B ranged between approaches that have pointed the struggle of classes as a fundamental responsible by changes that occurred in the Soviet regime, while on the other hand, approaches that used an economics¿ tendency evaluation, putting the socialism problems as the consequence of development of the productive forces and its imperatives. Amazing piece of fortune, or not, the PC of B got out from discussion about these essential issues, or, when did it, approached them superficially, using a marginal way, keeping stronger questions without answers and keeping the theoretical formulations constantly under the local political demands, enhanced by a growing institutionalization in the political system
Doutorado
Ciencia Politica
Doutor em Ciência Política

In both Soviet and Western historiography, Russian populism (narodnichestvo) has been studied more or less in isolation from the broader socialist movement in Europe. The aim of this thesis is to show that although it undoubtedly possessed characteristics peculiar to Russia, the populist movement should be understood as part of the Europe-wide revolutionary movement. To accomplish this, the thesis is structured around chapters discussing individuals who were involved in both the Russian revolutionary movement and the European anarchist movement, with which populism shared many ideas, ideologies tactics and internal disputes. These individuals are Mikhail Bakunin, Zemfirii Ralli and Petr Kropotkin. Around these chapters are studies of groups or movements connected with those individuals in Russia or Europe. Central themes include consistency, or the social groups which the revolutionaries hoped to address; organisational forms adopted by anarchists and populists; tactics to be used to rouse their constituencies to action and to organise and achieve revolution; relations of the revolutionaries to the masses; the differing concepts of political and social/economic revolution; and the rise of terrorism in both movements.

This thesis investigates a corpus of films identifiable as Hollywood political thrillers during the Cold War spanning a period of seventeen years, between 1945 and 1962. It aims to dispel the assertion by critics and scholars that the political thriller originates with the release of The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962). Moreover, it is my intent to engage an interdisciplinary approach given that the relationship between contemporary American cinema, ideology and propaganda has often been overlooked (see Shaw, 2007). Utilizing textual and contextual analysis, I shall argue that The Manchurian Candidate is a transitional film with respect to the political thriller. I shall also offer an explanation for the frequent mislabeling of Hollywood political thrillers as film noir, of which generic hybridity or overlap is a contributing factor. The first part of this thesis shall establish a political and historical context, which includes a discussion of Hollywood’s early entry into the Cold War, U.S. strategies of containment and the threat women posed to U.S. national security vis à vis Ethel Rosenberg. Given that the political thriller emerged as a distinct subgenre during the Cold War, the first part of this thesis shall include a chapter on technology and innovation (e.g. lighting, format, film stock) as a means of supporting prime generic theme of authenticity. Five exemplary mini-case studies shall be presented to demonstrate the way in which the Hollywood political thriller delivered distinct narrative and visual style that both projected and reflected Cold War discourses. Philip Wylie’s “momism” shall be considered within the context of the political thriller and Cold War discourses surrounding gender, U.S. national security and the atomic bomb. I shall expand upon current discussions of momism, approaching it through distinct representations evident within the political thriller. Given the pervasiveness of the nuclear threat during the Cold War, I shall discuss the thematic elements of fear and the unknowability of the atomic bomb in relation to the political thriller. In the second part of this thesis, I identify three distinct cycles of atomic political thrillers, in which issues of vulnerability of the physical locale, the nuclear family and the mind are addressed.

This thesis examines the evolution of Russia’s internal and external security perceptions from 2000-2008. Drawing on social constructivist ontology, it argues that the Putin regime’s articulation of security priorities evolved in relation to its reconceptualisation of Russian state identity from a ‘weak’ to a ‘strong’ state. To trace this evolutionary relationship between state identity and security perceptions, official discourse on Chechnya is examined. In this way, Russian narrative constructions of the process of securitisation and desecuritisation of Chechnya, and the role that this discourse played within the articulation of state identity and security priorities are investigated. The thesis suggests that the initial securitisation and subsequent desecuritisation of Chechnya are best understood within the Putin regime’s discursive construction of state building and changing security priorities, rather than as a reflection of shifting material conditions. The thesis concludes that analysis of individual security policies should take into account that the narrative construction of these policies shape, and are shaped by, the multifaceted and evolutionary meta-narratives of Russian state and security identity. Moreover, it is argued that Russian security policy should be studied as a subject in its own right, investigating both internal and external security issues, rather than being subsumed within a broader foreign policy analysis.

Il existe une continuité dans l’« idée » russe de l’Etat qu’une analogie dans la continuité des systèmes ne reflète pas. De la Russie impériale à la Russie soviétique, l’Etat (Gosudarstvo) n’est pas conçu comme une entité abstraite et autonome. A la dimension césariste du pouvoir correspond la non-émergence, et du concept et de la réalité d’un Etat. Jusqu’en 1917, la conception russe du pouvoir est conditionnée par le discours idéologique – religieux. Après 1917, sa principale caractéristique est d’être subordonnée à l’idéologie, en tant qu’expression de la volonté du Parti communiste. L’Etat soviétique s’impose donc comme un Etat « de fait » et non comme un Etat « de droit ». La prédominance du discours idéologique entrave, à la fois, la constitution d’une culture de l’Etat, qui reste une culture du pouvoir, et la formation d’une culture de l’antériorité et de la supériorité du droit sur l’Etat. Après la désintégration de l’Union soviétique, la référence à la démocratie libérale et à l’Etat de droit devient un outil de la création d’une nouvelle légitimité pour l’Etat postcommuniste. L’entrée de la Russie dans la modernité politique nécessite une rupture avec les postulats idéologiques du passé. Or, la déconstruction du socialisme est un processus beaucoup plus complexe que la construction de la démocratie. Bien qu’ayant subi, sur plusieurs siècles, plusieurs types de transitions – de l’absolutisme de droit divin au socialisme, puis au postcommunisme -, l’Etat russe a donc conservé certains caractères constants et typiques qui en font, encore aujourd’hui, un modèle hybride, en tension entre autoritarisme et démocratie
There is a continuity as concerns the « idea » of the state that an analogy with the different systems does not reflect. From imperial to Soviet Russia, the state (Gosudarstvo) is not thought of as an abstract and autonomous entity. Until 1917, the Russian conception of power is conditioned by the religious ideological discourse. After 1917, her main feature is one of submission to ideology, in other words the expression of the will of the Communist Party. The Soviet state stands out by its « de facto » nature, rather than a « de jure » state. The supremacy of the ideological discourse hampers both the constitution of a new state culture, which remains focused on power, and the formation of the precedence and the superiority of law over the state. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, reference to liberal democracy and the rule of law becomes a tool in creating renewed legitimacy for the postcommunist state. Russia’s entry into political modernity demands a rupture with the ideological postulates of the past. The dismantlement of socialism is a much more complex process than the construction of democracy. Despite having been subjected, over centuries, to many types of transition – absolutism founded on divine right to socialism, then postcommunism -, the Russian state has always preserved certain features (be they constant or specific) that make it, and still today, a hybrid model pulling towards both authoritarianism and democracy

This dissertation is a quantitative study with elements of qualitative analysis. The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate WHAT was written about Ukraine's independence 1917 in Swedish press 1917–1918. The qualitative part of the survey was intended to answer the question if the newspaper's political attitude influenced the news reports during the chosen period. The exact periodization was determined to be between March 1, 1917 and June 30, 1918. This periodization was chosen because of the March Revolution in 1917, which triggered independence declarations in a number of countries oppressed by Moscow, who now saw their chance of freedom. June 1918 became the end of the investigation because it was just when the peace agreement between Ukraine and the Soviet Union was signed. The source material has been chosen to represent a multitude of ideological orientations. It was liberal, moderate, conservative, liberal and left-wing orientations. The source material consisted of newspaper articles from the following newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Göteborgs Aftonblad, Svenska Dagbladet, Dalpilen, Kalmar Tidning and Norrskensflamman. Quantitative methodology was used on the source material. This method consisted of a reviewing of newspaper articles in searching of news reports from Ukraine or articles which had something to do with the events in Ukraine. Every newspaper was searched day after day. The crawled material was presented in two chapters representing different periods. The first chapter of the results presented the results from 1917, and more precisely from March to December 1917. The second chapter presented the results from 1918, but also from December 1917, that is, the result from December 1917 through June 1918. The whole result was then discussed in a separate chapter where the qualitative analysis was also discussed. The result of the quantitative analysis showed that it has been written relatively sparcely about Ukraine's independence although the volume of articles increased from December 1917 and even more in 1918. Sometimes there were articles on the first page. But for the most part, the articles with Ukraine issues were placed among other foreign articles. It was also found in the survey that it was the first World War that drew attention to the newspapers, even though the events in Petrograd and then in Ukraine took more space. This survey also showed that what was written about Ukraine's independence was also what appears in the reference literature. The news reports reported how Ukraine proclaimed independence in March 1917 and later on proclaimed an independent republic in November 1917 when the Bolsheviks conducted their coup d'état in Petrograd. The newspapers also wrote how the Russian Communists sent a declaration of war to Ukraine in December 1917 and about the war that followed. The articles also tell us how negotiations on Ukraine Peace went on in Brest-Litovsk, and how they ended up with alliance between Germany and Ukraine with the campaign against the communists. It was told how the German army marched into Ukraine to free it from the bolsheviks. Until May 1918 there were battles between the German-Ukrainian Army and the Communists. In June 1918 the peace agreement was signed and this survey’s investigation ended. The survey showed that it was written about Ukraine's independence in all newspapers. Dagens Nyheter had the most news articles linked to the survey. Although the number of articles was not subject for analysis in this survey. The qualitative analysis was based on using Höjelid's theoretical concepts "positive sound" and "negative sound" on the quantitative analysis material. The qualitative analysis’ result showed that it was almost impossible to see the differences between the newspapers because the articles were traded between the newspapers, i.e. the content was copied straight away. It should be noted that not all content was the subject of copying between the newspapers. Copying occurred to a greater extent, but there were still original articles derived from the respective newspaper. Most of the articles were also direct telegrams that were communicated abroad to the newspaper's editors. A lot of these telegrammic articles were sent with a purpose to mislead society. These angled articles were published without further examination in Swedish press. There were articles from, for example, Dagens Nyheter whose editors noted the "strange Petrograd reports" and informed about it for the purpose of enlightening the public. However, as most newspapers were occupied with World War I, as was shown in the source material, the newspaper editorial office was less interested in other foreign events. Therefore, such angled articles could be found in Swedish press on a larger scale.
Denna avhandling är en kvantitativ studie med inslag av kvalitativ analys. Syftet med denna kvantitativa studien var att undersöka VAD som skrevs om Ukrajinas självständighet 1917 i svensk press 1917–1918. Den kvalitativa delen av undersökningen ämnade att besvara frågan om tidningens politiska hållningen påverkade nyhetsrapporteringen under den valda perioden. Den exakta periodiseringen fastställdes att vara mellan den 1 mars 1917 och den 30 juni 1918. Denna periodisering valdes på grund av marsrevolutionen 1917 som utlöste självständighets-förklaringar i en rad länder som var förtryckta av Moskovitien och som nu såg sin chans till frihet. Juni 1918 blev slutpunkten i undersökningen därför att det var just då som fredsavtalet mellan Ukrajina och Sovjet undertecknades. Källmaterialet har valts att representera en mångfald ideologiska inriktningar. Det var liberal, moderat, konservativ, frisinnad samt vänstersocial inriktningar. Källmaterialet bestod av tidningsartiklar från följande tidningar: Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Göteborgs Aftonblad, Svenska Dagbladet, Dalpilen, Kalmar tidning och Norrskensflamman. Det användes kvantitativ metod på källmaterialet som bestod i en genomsökning av tidningsartiklarna efter nyhetsrapporter från Ukrajina eller som hade något med händelserna i Ukrajina att göra. Varje tidning genomsöktes dag för dag. Det genomsökta materialet presenterades i två kapitel som representerade olika perioder. Det första resultatkapitlet presenterade resultatet från år 1917, och mer exakt från mars till december 1917. Det andra kapitlet presenterade resultatet från år 1918, men även från december 1917, det vill säga resultatet från och med december 1917 till och med juni 1918. Det hela resultatet diskuterades sedan i ett eget kapitel där även den kvalitativa analysen diskuterades. Resultatet från den kvantitativa analysen visade att det har skrivits relativt sparsmakat om Ukrajinas självständighet även om artikelmängden ökade från december 1917 och ännu mer under 1918. Ibland förekom det artiklar på första sidan. Men för det mesta placerades artiklarna med Ukrajina-frågor bland andra utlandsartiklar. Det framgick också i undersökningen att det var mest första världskriget som upptog tidningarnas uppmärksamhet, även om händelserna i Petrograd och sedan i Ukrajina tog allt mer plats allt eftersom. Denna undersökning visade också att det som skrevs om Ukrajinas självständighet var också det som förekommer i referenslitteraturen. Nyhetsrapporterna berättade hur Ukrajina utropat sin självständighet i mars 1917 tills landet proklamerat en oberoende republik i november 1917 när bolsjevikerna genomförde sin statskupp i Petrograd. Tidningarna skrev också hur de ryska kommunisterna skickade krigsförklaring till Ukrajina i december 1917 och om det kriget som följde efter det. Artiklarna berättar även om hur förhandlingarna för Ukrajinafreden gick till i Brest-Litovsk samt hur dessa avslutades med att Tyskland allierade sig med Ukrajina i kampen mot kommunisterna. Det berättades hur den tyska armén marscherade in i Ukrajina för att befria det från bolsjevikerna. Fram till maj 1918 pågick det strider mellan tysk-ukrajinska armén och kommunisterna. I juni 1918 undertecknades fredsavtalet och där slutade undersökningen.  Undersökningen visade att det skrevs om Ukrajinas självständighet i samtliga tidningar. Dagens Nyheter hade flest nyhetsartiklar kopplade till undersökningen. Även om antalet artiklar ej var i syfte att analysera i denna undersökning. Den kvalitativa analysen gick ut på att använda Höjelids teoretiska begrepp ”positiv klang” och ”negativ klang” på den kvantitativa analysens resultatmaterial. Det kvalitativa resultatet visade att det var nästintill omöjligt att se skillnad mellan de olika tidningarna eftersom artiklarna traderades mellan tidningarna, det vill säga innehållet kopierades rakt av. Det bör påpekas att inte allt innehåll var ämne för kopiering mellan tidningarna. Kopieringen förekom i större utsträckning men det fanns ändå originella artiklar som härstammade från respektive tidning. De flesta av artiklarna var dessutom direkta telegram som kommunicerades i utlandet till tidningens redaktioner. En hel del av dessa telegraferade artiklar skickades med ett givet syfte att vilseleda samhällsopinionen. Dessa vinklade artiklar publicerades utan vidare granskning i svensk press. Det förekom artiklar från exempelvis Dagens Nyheter vars redaktion uppmärksammat de ”märkliga Petrogradrapporter” och informerat om det i möjligt syfte att upplysa allmänheten. Men eftersom de flesta tidningarna var upptagna med första världskriget, som det visades i källmaterialet, var tidningsredaktionerna mindre intresserade av andra utländska händelser. Därför kunde sådana vinklade artiklar förekomma i svensk press i en större omfattning.

Defence date: 22 May 2014
Examining Board: Professor Stephen Smith, EUI - Supervisor; Professor Pavel Kolář, EUI; Professor Susan E. Reid, University of Sheffield; Professor Steven E. Harris, University of Mary Washington.
This PhD thesis explores a history of multiple visions of Socialist construction as articulated by Soviet architects, mainly but not exclusively in the Khrushchev era. Most commonly, Soviet architecture of this era is associated with the return of modernist aesthetics into the architectural practice of the Soviet Union. I question both these elements: whether there was a return and whether it was to modernism. In order to examine these questions I focus on Soviet architects and their visions and trace the evolution of professional discourses and practices across the rupture of 1954 spanning the period from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. Rather than thinking of architecture simply as an aesthetic discourse and building practice that either represented the regime or failed to do so, this thesis deals with architecture as a fundamental component of the revolutionary project of building Socialism, part and parcel of the state-driven program to make the physical and social landscape of the Soviet Union modern . I refer to the professional aspirations and imperatives of Soviet architects embedded in this revolutionary project as 'Socialist Modern'. Simply put, I show that there were many synchronic and diachronic visions of Socialist Modern. In particular, in chapter one I revisit the era after 1932 in Soviet architecture, a time of radical departure from the principles of modern architecture, and demonstrate how different understandings of modern architecture co-existed. Chapter two analyses how these divergent visions resurfaced and clashed after Khrushchev announced a radical shift to mass construction in 1954, which allows us to see this time as not merely one of ruptures and impositions of new rules from the top but as a history of equally important continuities established by Soviet architects themselves. In chapters three and four I examine two synchronic visions for Socialist Modern, the pragmatic design for Novye Cheriomushki and the visionary project of NER, which originated from different sources and constituted two different programs for the future of Soviet architecture. Chapter five traces how the pragmatic vision articulated in the Cheriomushki project evolved into Soviet mainstream and later into what I call Generic Modern and how the NER vision developed into a full-blown alternative that I call Organic Modern. Based on so far unexplored archival sources, the professional press and memoirs, this study challenges the prevailing emphasis on ruptures in Soviet architecture and constitutes a first step in mapping the diversity of Socialist Modern within the Soviet Union and within the Second World.

Defence date: 15 December 2017
Examining Board: Prof. Stephen Anthony Smith, Oxford University (Supervisor); Prof. Michel Offerlé, Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) (Co-supervisor); Prof. Alexander Etkind, European University Institute; Prof. David Priestland, Oxford University
The Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) was founded after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943 with the mission of training a new generation of flag bearers of Communist ideals and Soviet State interests on the international scene, the so-called meždunarodniki. Often cited as the alma mater of most of the leading figures involved in the conduct of the Soviet diplomacy during Cold War, the MGIMO has received paradoxically little attention from scholars. Most researchers who have mentioned it present the Institute either as a crucible of social reproduction in the 1970s Soviet Union or as a subversive place, whose ‘net thinking’ paved the way to Gorbachev’s perestroika. For their part, numerous meždunarodniki describe the MGIMO as a Soviet Tsarskoye Selo or a Communist Lyceum: they surprisingly refer to their experience at the Institute in terms redolent of Russian imperial history, stressing the fact that they were much more than experts in foreign affairs and that they occupied a distinct place within the Soviet elite. Ranging from the end of World War II to the collapse of the USSR, this research aims at analyzing the making of a hybrid social category, what I describe as Party nobility in the Soviet Union, the identity of which shaped and was shaped by the Cold War. How did an institution and its alumni form a distinct social group that sat at the very core of the Cold War enterprise? How did MGIMO become the place where a specific praxis of foreign affairs was inculcated, based on the hybridisation of aristocratic manners and communist ethics during the Khrushchev and the Brezhnev era? Why was the loyalty of both the institution and the social group put into question during perestroika as early as 1985? These are some of the main questions this research will answer.

abstract: This dissertation explores the roles of ethnic minority cultural elites in the development of socialist culture in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s through the late 1960s. Although Marxist ideology predicted the fading away of national allegiances under communism, Soviet authorities embraced a variety of administrative and educational policies dedicated to the political, economic, and cultural modernization of the country’s non-Russian populations. I analyze the nature and implementation of these policies from the perspective of ethnic Tatars, a Muslim Turkic group and contemporary Russia’s largest minority. Tatar cultural elites utilized Soviet-approved cultural forms and filled them with Tatar cultural content from both the pre-Revolutionary past and the socialist present, creating art and literature that they saw as contributing to both the Tatar nation and to Soviet socialism. I argue that these Tatar cultural elites believed in the emancipatory potential of Soviet socialism and that they felt that national liberation and national development were intrinsic parts of the Soviet experiment. Such idealism remained present in elite discourses through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s, but after Stalin’s death it was joined by open disillusionment with what some Tatars identified as a nascent Russocentrism in Soviet culture. The coexistence of these two strands of thought among Tatar cultural elites suggests that the integration of Tatar national culture into the broad, internationalist culture envisioned by Soviet authorities in Moscow was a complex and disputed process which produced a variety of outcomes that continue to characterize Tatar culture in the post-Soviet period. This dissertation is based on significant archival research and utilizes various state and Communist Party documents, as well as memoirs, letters, and other personal sources in both Russian and Tatar. It challenges traditional periodization by bridging the Stalin and post-Stalin eras and emphasizes on-the-ground developments rather than official state policy. Finally, it offers insight into the relationship between communism and ethnic difference and presents a nuanced vision of Soviet power that helps to explain the continuing role of nationalism in the contemporary Russian Federation and other post-communist states.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation History 2019

After the Bolshevik assumption of power in 1917, the arguably much more difficult task of creating a revolutionary society began. In 1919, to ensure Russian women supported the Communist party, the Zhenotdel, or women’s department, was established. Its aim was propagating the Communist party’s message through local branches attached to party committees at every level of the hierarchy. This dissertation is an analysis of the Communist party’s Zhenotdel in Petrograd/ Leningrad during the 1920s. Most Western Zhenotdel histories were written in the pre-archival era, and this is the first study to extensively utilize material in the former Leningrad party archive, TsGAIPD SPb. Both the quality and quantity of Zhenotdel fonds is superior at St.Peterburg’s TsGAIPD SPb than Moscow’s RGASPI. While most scholars have used Moscow-centric journals like "Kommunistka", "Krest’ianka" and "Rabotnitsa", this study has thoroughly utilized the Leningrad Zhenotdel journal "Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka" and a rich and extensive collection of Zhenotdel questionnaires. Women’s speeches from Zhenotdel conferences, as well as factory and field reports, have also been folded into the dissertation’s five chapters on: organizational issues, the unemployed, housewives and prostitutes, peasants, and workers. Fundamentally, this dissertation argues that how Zhenotdel functioned at the local level revealed that the organization as a whole was riven with multiple and conflicting tensions. Zhenotdel was unworkable. Zhenotdel’s broad goals were impeded because activists lacked financial and jurisdictional autonomy, faced party ambivalence and hostility, and operated largely with volunteers. Paradoxically, these volunteer delegates were “interns,” yet they were expected to model exemplary behaviour. With limited resources, delegates were also expected to fulfil an ever-expanding list of tasks. In addition, Zhenotdel’s extensive use of unpaid housewife delegates in the 1920s anticipated the wife-activist movement of voluntary social service work in the middle to late 1930s. There were competing visions for NEP society, and Zhenotdel officials were largely unable to negotiate the importance of their organization to other party and state organizations. Overall, this suggests that although the political revolution was successful in the 1920s, there were profound limits to the social and cultural revolution in this era.

Education systems are influenced by belief systems. Russia has throughout its history been guided by two rigid dogmatic belief systems: • the Russian Orthodox Church • the Communist ideology While other influences also prevailed, notably autocracy, humanism and nationalism, these were secondary to the dogma of the Church in the centuries preceding the Revolution in 1917. Autocracy could be regarded as an outflow of the dogma of the Church, which had established its links with the ruling elite early in its history, whereas the others originated from other sources and for other reasons. This study in the history and development of the Russian education system traces its origins back into the inchoate beginnings of the Russian nation and attempts to show how: • the Zeitgeist of a particular era led to the development of a particular dogmatic belief system • the Zeitgeist and the dogmatic beliefs influenced the figures who determined educational policies and reforms
Onderwysstelsels word be"invloed deur 'n bepaalde denksisteem. So byvoorbeeld is Rusland deur die geskiedenis deur rigiede dogmatiese denksisteme gelei. Gelyklopend daarmee was daar ook ander denksisteme wat 'n invloed op die Russiese denke uitgeoefen het. lnvloede soos outokrasie, humanisme en nasionalisme was egter sekonder tot die dogmatiese invloede van die Kerk in die eeue voor die Rewolusie van 1917. Outokrasie kan weliswaar as 'n uitvloeisel van die dogma van die Kerk , wat vroeg in die Russiese geskiedenis 'n verbintenis met die regerende elite gesmee het, beskou word. Die onderhawige studie oor die ontwikkeling en verloop van die Russiese opvoedstelsel vind sy oorsprong in die beginjare van die Russiese volk en poog om aan te toon hoe: • die Zeitgeist van 'n bepaalde era tot bepaalde dogmatiese denksisteme gelei het • die Zeitgeist en dogmatiese denksisteme 'n invloed op die opvoedingsdenke en onderwyshervormings van bepaalde historiese figure in die Russiese verlede uitgeoefen het.
Educational Studies
M. Ed. (History of Education)

My dissertation, entitled "All Work and no Play? Labor, Literature and Industrial Modernity," analyzes writing about work that was mostly published in communist and anarchist newspapers during the Weimar Republic. Discussing texts that have been almost fully neglected, my approach departs from existing scholarship on Weimar in two significant ways: First, I analyze these texts in the context of the period's dominant theories, practices, psychologies, and utopian ideas concerning labor. Due to the proximity of artistic and industrial 'production' particularly in the minds and practices of Weimar communists, I consider these literary treatments of work also within the framework of literary and artistic meta-discourses during the Weimar Republic (e.g. Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Productivism). Second, investigating such controversial issues as industrialization, the division of labor, technology, progress, etc., my dissertation leads to a transnational (hi)story in which Weimar Germany can be viewed in the larger context of American imports such as Taylorism and Fordism, their Soviet variants, and pre-industrial counter-models. Chapters One and Two scrutinize communist discourse on work, with Chapter One focusing on the situation in Germany (especially the rationalization drive sweeping the Weimar Republic after 1924 and its literary representations in the communist newspaper Die rote Fahne) and Chapter Two discussing the complex cross-fertilization between German and Soviet communist politics and culture (Egon Erwin Kisch, Sergei Tretiakov, et al.). In these two chapters, I put forth a critique of dominant Marxism-Leninism at the time. Its fetishization of labor and modernization can be found in the texts I discuss (although in highly contradictory terms), and was at the core of the worker-authors' self-understanding as "engineers" of socialism. Chapters Three and Four present the challenge to communism's labor theories and artistic models that arises from various anarchist and syndicalist factions at the time -- groups I summarily call 'anti-authoritarian socialism.' Proposing a veritable exodus from industrial modernity in texts published in Fritz Kater's Der Syndikalist and Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion, anti-authoritarian socialists ventured to mostly pre-industrial settings both within Germany (e.g. in the case of Heinrich Vogeler's Barkenhoff commune) and Mexico (in this case, through the work of B. Traven).
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The Sino-Soviet Split of the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s was a multidimensional crisis of nationalism, national interests, domestic politics, personal problems, cultural differences, border issues, Soviet-American détente, communication misunderstanding, and different interpretations of ideology. The goal of this diploma thesis is to analyse the important domestic and foreign factors which contributed to the worsening of Sino-Soviet relations. In this interdisciplinary study, the author wants to over bridge the differences between Diplomatic History and International Relations Theory, the subfields of History and Political Science. In the first part, there is an analysis of current Sino-Soviet Split historiography (Lorenz Lüthi, Sergey Radchenko, Xia Yafeng, Austin Jersild) by using theories of International Relations (liberalism, realism and constructivism). The second part provides a historical description of the Sino-Soviet Split. Emphasis is placed on the Chinese side and especially regarding the role of Mao Zedong. This thesis focuses on the period between 1958 and 1964, nevertheless it is neccessary to include preceding and subsequent phases of the relations. It is essential due to cultural, ideological and national factors. These factors endured a long time and it would be impossible to...

This thesis discusses the role of Czechoslovakia within the framework of the Chinese- Soviet split. Based on the analysis of archival sources, it explores Czechoslovak proceedings within the given issue at the diplomatic level as well as the Communist Party level. Its aim is to confirm or disprove the statement that Czechoslovakia was a so-called small player in this dispute and acted more independently on the USSR policy . It focuses on mutual Czechoslovak-Chinese relations and their development in the given period, i.e. 1950-1969. It analyzes the progress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from its viewpoint at international conferences of Communist and workers' organizations, but also at Party sessions. The thesis also describes the Chinese-Soviet split in the Third World and its influence on Czechoslovak policy. Last but not least, the thesis focuses on the factors that influenced the formation of the Czechoslovak attitude on this issue. The thesis studies given range of issues with the help of archival sources of Czech provenance and foreign materials available in electronic form.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
The collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union offered an unprecedented opportunity for the international community to support transitions to democracy in a region that had long known only totalitarian rule. Among the key players engaged in supporting efforts were U.S. grantmaking institutions, including both non-state and quasi-state aid providers. This thesis explores the motivations and evolving strategies of three different types of grantmaking institutions in a single country, Russia, with a particular focus on democracy aid provision from 1988-2002. The three types of grantmaking organizations examined through case studies include: the Ford Foundation, a private foundation with a history of international grantmaking spanning several decades; the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a private foundation known primarily for its domestic focus with a much shorter history of international grantmaking; and, finally, the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government-created and heavily taxpayer-funded organization established as a private nonprofit organization to make grants specifically for democracy promotion. Motivating factors for initiating or expanding grantmaking in Russia in the late 1980s included a previous history of grantmaking in the region, a previously established institutional commitment to democracy promotion, international peace and security concerns, and interest from a top institutional leader. Over the course of the fourteen year period studied, five grantmaking features are identified as influencing the development of grantmaking strategies: professional grantmaking staff; organizational habit; global political, social, and economic environments; market and other funding source influences; and physical presence. Though subject to constraints, the non-state and quasi-state grantmaking institutions included in this study were able to avoid weaknesses identified with private philanthropy in other research and demonstrated a willingness to experiment and take risks, an ability to operate at the non-governmental level, and a commitment to long-term grantmaking, informed by expertise.

La chute de l’URSS en 1991 a permis un renouvellement de l’historiographie occidentale sur l’histoire de ce pays durant la Guerre froide : avec l’accès à de nouvelles archives, les dimensions sociales et culturelles sont désormais prisées et la production culturelle soviétique est examinée avec un regard plus apaisé. À partir de 1967, un magazine à grand tirage soviétique fait son apparition dans plusieurs villes occidentales : le Spoutnik Digest. Son titre évoque à la fois le satellite soviétique, qui a fasciné la planète dix ans plus tôt, et le Reader’s Digest, le magazine américain agrégateur de contenu le plus vendu et le plus lu dans le monde à l’époque. La revue mensuelle, quoique similaire à son homologue américain au premier regard, contient des textes exclusivement issus d’Union soviétique et de ses journaux officiels. Comme le Reader’s Digest, le Spoutnik Digest est un objet de propagande, mais la revue offre un regard différent sur l’URSS durant la Guerre froide et sur les tensions mondiales de l’époque : dans le Spoutnik Digest, l’URSS est un pays pacifique, culturellement riche et où il fait bon vivre, la revue priorisant la valorisation du monde communiste plutôt que la critique du capitalisme et des États-Unis en particulier. En ce sens, le Spoutnik Digest se distingue clairement du Reader’s Digest, dont l’anticommunisme est agressif et omniprésent. Ce mémoire étudie le Spoutnik Digest en tant qu’objet historique et culturel entre les années 1968 et 1988. L’analyse de sa forme et de son contenu porte sur les origines de cette revue, son lectorat cible et les thèmes les plus couverts, révélant au final le message soviétique de paix et de bonne volonté politique que le magazine tentait de transmettre dans le monde durant la Guerre froide.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed the Cold War historiography to renew itself: social and cultural dimensions are acknowledged and the outlook on the cultural material emanating from USSR can be analyzed with more scientific objectivity and an appeased perspective. In 1967, a new magazine appeared in many Western cities: the Sputnik Digest. Its name referred both to the Soviet satellite that fascinated the world ten years earlier and the Reader’s Digest, the famous American magazine specialized in content aggregating, the most read and sold internationally at the time. The Sputnik Digest, published on a monthly basis, even though looking similar to its American counterpart at first sight, contained texts directly extracted from official Soviet newspapers in USSR. Without doubt a propaganda tool, like its American counterpart, the magazine however offered a fresh insight of the USSR during the Cold War: from the Sputnik Digest point of view, the Soviet Union was a peaceful country, culturally rich and a great place to live in. The magazine prioritized the valorisation of the USSR as opposed to criticizing the capitalist Western powers and the United States. From that standpoint it radically diverged from the aggressive ideological tone of the Reader’s Digest. This master’s thesis, through this new perspective, will study the Sputnik Digest as a historical and cultural object between the years 1968 and 1988. By looking both at its format and content, it will examine the origins of this monthly journal, its targeted readership and the most covered themes, revealing the message of Soviet peace and goodwill that the magazine tried to spread worldwide during the Cold War.

This thesis examines the Communist Party of Australia's (CPA) period of illegality between 1940 and 1942. This thesis also examines the CPA's relationship to the Comintern during, and before, World War II. A grasp of that relationship is essential for understanding the causes of the CPA's proscription.

This diploma thesis focuses on the appropriate and effective use of film and serial adaptations of topics falling into the period of communist totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia (that is between 1948 and 1989, with emphasis on the period 1948-1969). The thesis is divided into four chapters, whereas the main part, which is didactic, is described in the third and fourth chapter. The first chapter describes the basic historical context of the communist government in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989. It also shows and explains the origin of the idea of communism, the further development of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia during the First Republic, and the postwar Third Republic. This chapter was put together using found edited sources and secondary literature. The second chapter deals with individual film and serial processing of topics related to the period. It presents specific films and series which were produced in the most recent years (or the post-revolutionary period), but also materials produced during the totalitarianism before 1989. In this chapter some works are discussed in greater detail, others are presented as selected alternative options for interaction for educational purposes. The third chapter summarizes the didactic and historical potential of the discussed topic, it also...