THE SOVIET UNION Fall 2014 Professor
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Russian Revolutions: the Impact and Limitations of Western Influence
Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Faculty and Staff Publications By Year Faculty and Staff Publications 2003 The Russian Revolutions: The Impact and Limitations of Western Influence Karl D. Qualls Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.dickinson.edu/faculty_publications Part of the European History Commons Recommended Citation Qualls, Karl D., "The Russian Revolutions: The Impact and Limitations of Western Influence" (2003). Dickinson College Faculty Publications. Paper 8. https://scholar.dickinson.edu/faculty_publications/8 This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Karl D. Qualls The Russian Revolutions: The Impact and Limitations of Western Influence After the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have again turned their attention to the birth of the first Communist state in hopes of understanding the place of the Soviet period in the longer sweep of Russian history. Was the USSR an aberration from or a consequence of Russian culture? Did the Soviet Union represent a retreat from westernizing trends in Russian history, or was the Bolshevik revolution a product of westernization? These are vexing questions that generate a great deal of debate. Some have argued that in the late nineteenth century Russia was developing a middle class, representative institutions, and an industrial economy that, while although not as advanced as those in Western Europe, were indications of potential movement in the direction of more open government, rule of law, free market capitalism. Only the Bolsheviks, influenced by an ideology imported, paradoxically, from the West, interrupted this path of Russian political and economic westernization. -
'Socialism in One Country': Komsomol'tsy
Youthful Internationalism in the Age of ‘Socialism in One Country’: Komsomol’tsy, Pioneers and ‘World Revolution’ in the Interwar Period Matthias Neumann On the 1st of March 1927, two Komsomol members from the Chuvash Republic, located in the centre of European Russia, wrote an emotional letter to Comrade Stalin. Reflecting on the revolutionary upheavals in China, they attacked the inaction of the Komsomol and the party and expressed their sincere determination to self-mobilise and join the proletarian forces in China. ‘We do not need empty slogans such as “The Komsomol is prepared”’, ‘We must not live like this’ they wrote and boasted ‘we guarantee that we are able to mobilise thousands of Komsomol members who have the desire to go to China and fight in the army of the Guomindang.’ This was after all, they forcefully stressed, the purpose for which ‘our party and our Komsomol exist.’1 These youngsters were not alone in their views. As the coverage on the situation in China intensified in the Komsomol press in March, numerous similar individual and collective letters were received by party and Komsomol leaders.2 The young authors, all male as far as they were named, expressed their genuine enthusiasm for the revolution in China. The letters revealed not only a youthful romanticism for the revolutionary fight abroad and the idea of spreading the revolution, but often an underlying sense of disillusionment with the inertia of the revolutionary project at home. A few months earlier, in 1926 during the campaign against the so-called eseninshchina3, a fellow Komsomol member took a quite different view on the prospect of spreading the revolution around the world. -
Soviet Political Memoirs: a Study in Politics and Literature
SOVIET POLITICAL MEMOIRS: A STUDY IN POLITICS AND LITERATURE by ZOI LAKKAS B.A. HONS, The University of Western Ontario, 1990 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of History) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA June 1992 Zoi Lakkas, 1992 _________________ in presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department. or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. V Department of The University of British &‘olumbia Vancouver, Canada Date 1L4( /1 1q2 DE-6 (2/88) ii ABS TRACT A growing number of Soviet political memoirs have emerged from the former Soviet Union. The main aim of the meinoirists is to give their interpretation of the past. Despite the personal insight that these works provide on Soviet history, Western academics have not studied them in any detail. The principal aim of this paper is to prove Soviet political memoir’s importance as a research tool. The tight link between politics and literature characterizes the nature of Soviet political memoir. All forms of Soviet literature had to reform their brand of writing as the Kremlin’s policies changed from Stalin’s ruthless reign to Gorbachev’s period of openness. -
Soviet Ideology in Workers' Memoirs of the 1920S–1930S (A Case Study of John Scott's and Borys Weide's Memoirs)
Soviet Ideology in Workers’ Memoirs of the 1920s–1930s (A Case Study of John Scott’s and Borys Weide’s Memoirs) Author(s): Oksana Klymenko Source: Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 3 (2016): 37–55 Published by: National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy http://kmhj.ukma.edu.ua/ Soviet Ideology in Workers’ Memoirs of the 1920s‑1930s (A Case Study of John Scott’s and Borys Weide’s Memoirs) Oksana Klymenko National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Department of History Abstract Ideology was the basis of Bolshevik policy and was used as a means of control over society. Key Bolshevik ideological postulates were created and disseminated in the 1920s‑1930s. The goal of this study is to analyze the influence of Soviet ideology on workers of the 1920s‑1930s in the memoirs of John Scott and Borys Weide, who participated in the building of Magnitogorsk and DniproHES, respectively. Based on the memoirs, the article investigates the dissemination of ideology and describes its main tasks in the 1920s‑1930s, such as “the building of socialism,” and the glorification and formation of the “new Soviet man.” These two constructs have several components, which are considered in the article. For example, glorification of “the building of socialism” was achieved through demonstrating Soviet “achievements” in industry, “superiority” to “capitalist countries” of the West, etc. To form the “new man,” images of “self” and “other” were created and an anti‑religious campaign was conducted. The study focuses on the writing style of workers’ texts, as the memoirs were written in a formalized “Bolshevik” language through which their authors demonstrated their loyalty to the state. -
Behind the Urals an American Worker in Russia’S City of Steel
Behind the Urals An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel By John Scott Written in 1942 Foreword John Scott, whose father was Scott Nearing, a prominent progressive socialist and briefly a Communist, left the University of Wisconsin in 1931 after two years of study. Appalled by the depression in the United States and attracted by what he had heard concerning the effort to create a "new society" in the Soviet Union, he obtained training as a welder in a General Electric plant then went to the Soviet Union to join the great crusade. Assigned ultimately to construction of the new “Soviet Pittsburgh,’' Magnitogorsk, on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, the twenty-year-old was first an electric welder and then, after his role in construction had ended, a foreman and chemist in a coke and chemicals by-products plant. He lived in a barracks, suffered from the arctic wintry cold and the summer stifling heat, studied evenings, married a Russian girl—in short, lived for five years as a Russian among Russians, an opportunity very few Americans have had, particularly in such circumstances. Indeed, most young Americans would probably not have survived that rigorous life, just as many young Soviet citizens lost their lives falling from scaffolds, from improperly treated injuries, cold, and exhaustion. No other description of life in a new steel city provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five Year Plan. Scott had a clear eye for detail and produced a chronicle which includes the ugliness and the squalor as well as the endurance and the dedication. -
ABSTRACT BITCHES and THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, and PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS in the BITCHES' WAR by Adam Richard
ABSTRACT BITCHES AND THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR by Adam Richard Rodger Amongst the professional criminals imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, a split developed between those who kept to the Thieves’ Law and those who broke the Law and collaborated with the State. This violent schism, the Bitches’ War, raged across the entire Gulag system, becoming most heated between 1948 and 1953, and implicated the camps’ guards and administrators as much as the prisoners themselves. This research examines primary and secondary sources, heavily incorporating Gulag survivor memoirs, to investigate the culture of the Thieves-in-Law, these professional criminals, and also to uncover the involvement, intentions, and guilt of the camp administration. This study argues that the Bitches’ War sheds light on the real purpose and function of the Gulag; that it was not primarily about ideological re-education, nor was it primarily about economics and production, but that the Gulag served as a model for social control through use of power, persuasion, and violence. BITCHES AND THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of Master’s Degree by Adam Richard Rodger Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2017 Advisor: Dr. Stephen Norris Reader: Dr. Dan Prior Reader: Dr. Scott Kenworthy ©2017 Adam Richard Rodger This thesis titled BITCHES AND THIEVES GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR by Adam Richard Rodger has been approved for publication by The College of Arts and Sciences and The Department of History ____________________________________________________ Dr. -
Babel' in Context a Study in Cultural Identity B O R D E R L I N E S : R U S S I a N А N D E a S T E U R O P E a N J E W I S H S T U D I E S
Babel' in Context A Study in Cultural Identity B o r d e r l i n e s : r u s s i a n а n d e a s t e u r o p e a n J e w i s h s t u d i e s Series Editor: Harriet Murav—University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Editorial board: Mikhail KrutiKov—University of Michigan alice NakhiMovsKy—Colgate University David Shneer—University of Colorado, Boulder anna ShterNsHis—University of Toronto Babel' in Context A Study in Cultural Identity Ef r a i m Sic hEr BOSTON / 2012 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Effective July 29, 2016, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. ISBN 978-1-936235-95-7 Cloth ISBN 978-1-61811-145-6 Electronic Book design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com C o n t e n t s Note on References and Translations 8 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 1 / Isaak Babelʹ: A Brief Life 29 2 / Reference and Interference 85 3 / Babelʹ, Bialik, and Others 108 4 / Midrash and History: A Key to the Babelesque Imagination 129 5 / A Russian Maupassant 151 6 / Babelʹ’s Civil War 170 7 / A Voyeur on a Collective Farm 208 Bibliography of Works by Babelʹ and Recommended Reading 228 Notes 252 Index 289 Illustrations Babelʹ with his father, Nikolaev 1904 32 Babelʹ with his schoolmates 33 Benia Krik (still from the film, Benia Krik, 1926) 37 S. -
Pasternak Family Papers, 1878-2010
http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf70000535 No online items Register of the Pasternak Family Papers, 1878-2010 Processed by Olga Verhovskoy Dunlop; machine-readable finding aid created by Michael C. Conkin Hoover Institution Archives Stanford University Stanford, California 94305-6010 Phone: (650) 723-3563 Fax: (650) 725-3445 Email: [email protected] URL: http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives/ © 1998, 2007 Hoover Institution Archives. All rights reserved. Register of the Pasternak Family 96063 1 Papers, 1878-2010 Register of the Pasternak Family Papers, 1878-2010 Hoover Institution Archives Stanford University Stanford, California Contact Information Hoover Institution Archives Stanford University Stanford, California 94305-6010 Phone: (650) 723-3563 Fax: (650) 725-3445 Email: [email protected] Processed by: Olga Verhovskoy Dunlop Date Completed: 1996, revised 2003, 2007, 2009, 2010 Encoded by: Michael C. Conkin © 1998 Hoover Institution Archives. All rights reserved. Descriptive Summary Title: Pasternak family papers, Date (inclusive): 1878-2010 Collection Number: 96063 Creator: Pasternak family Extent: 52 manuscript boxes, 9 oversize boxes, 1 phonotape cassette, 1 videotape cassette (26.4 linear feet) Repository: Hoover Institution Archives Stanford, California 94305-6010 Abstract: Correspondence, diaries, memoirs, other writings, biographical data, printed matter, drawings, photographs, and other audiovisual material, relating to Russian art and literature, culture in the Soviet Union, and Russian emigre life. Includes papers of Leonid Pasternak; his son, the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak; his daughter Josephine Pasternak; and other family members. Physical location: Hoover Institution Archives Language: Russian and English. Access Boxes 37 and 44-49 may not be used without permission of the Archivist. -
An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel
ESSAI Volume 5 Article 19 1-1-2007 An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel Christine Dyslin College of DuPage, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://dc.cod.edu/essai Recommended Citation Dyslin, Christine (2007) "An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel," ESSAI: Vol. 5, Article 19. Available at: http://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol5/iss1/19 This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at [email protected].. It has been accepted for inclusion in ESSAI by an authorized administrator of [email protected].. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Dyslin: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel by Christine Dyslin (History 2225) ehind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel was published at a crucial moment in American history. The year 1942 saw the United States drawn into a conflict Balready raging on European soil: a war which was trying the souls of American allies in Britain and the Soviet Union. As a theme for this revealing book about his observations in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk, author John Scott used Winston Churchill’s May, 1940 speech to the House of Commons, at the start of British involvement in World War II, in which Churchill said, “ ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat’” (http://www.winstonchurchill.org). The choice to quote Churchill (actually, Scott misquotes Churchill) was a deliberate one, drawing an immediate parallel in the minds of Scott’s American readers; a parallel between the British people enduring the onslaught of Luftwaffe bombings, and the subject of his book, the Russian people, enduring the onslaught of Stalin’s Five-year plans. -
Talking Fish: on Soviet Dissident Memoirs*
Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs* Benjamin Nathans University of Pennsylvania My article may appear to be idle chatter, but for Western sovietolo- gists at any rate it has the same interest that a fish would have for an ichthyologist if it were suddenly to begin to talk. ðAndrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? ½samizdat, 1969Þ All Soviet émigrés write ½or: make up something. Am I any worse than they are? ðAleksandr Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus ½Lausanne, 1981Þ IfIamasked,“Did this happen?” I will reply, “No.” If I am asked, “Is this true?” Iwillsay,“Of course.” ðElena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters ½New York, 1991Þ I On July 6, 1968, at a party in Moscow celebrating the twenty-eighth birthday of Pavel Litvinov, two guests who had never met before lingered late into the night. Litvinov, a physics teacher and the grandson of Stalin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, had recently made a name for himself as the coauthor of a samizdat text, “An Appeal to World Opinion,” thathadgarneredwideattention inside and outside the Soviet Union. He had been summoned several times by the Committee for State Security ðKGBÞ for what it called “prophylactic talks.” Many of those present at the party were, like Litvinov, connected in one way or another to the dissident movement, a loose conglomeration of Soviet citizens who had initially coalesced around the 1966 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, seeking to defend civil rights inscribed in the Soviet constitution and * For comments on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank the anonymous readers for the Journal of Modern History as well as Alexander Gribanov, Jochen Hell- beck, Edward Kline, Ann Komaromi, Eli Nathans, Sydney Nathans, Serguei Oushakine, Kevin M. -
Black Americans and the Bolshevik Revolution
Painted Red: Black Americans and the Bolshevik Revolution By Michael L. Kent, Evergreen State College 1 | K e n t “Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”1 These are the opening lines of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folks, penned in 1903. Dr. Du Bois' words proved to be prophetic. World War I began in 1914. Popular movements against European colonial rule erupted, and violently, in Africa, Asia, Europe, India and the Americas at the end of World War I.2 When Dr. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folks, racial segregation was the law of the land in the United States. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, delivered a famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895. Washington's speech framed American domestic race policy for more than seventy years. “In all things purely social we [black and white] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”3 In 1896 the Supreme Court of the United States established the concept of legal segregation by race in the case Plessy v. Ferguson. Racial segregation became the law of the land in America.4 Between 1914 and 1918 European colonial empires fought the bloodiest war to date. The newly industrialized United States of America emerged on the world stage as a preeminent power. -
Monde Russe40(1-2)
LESLEY A. RIMMEL SVODKI AND POPULAR OPINION IN STALINIST LENINGRAD* THE RELATION OF PROPAGANDA TO POPULAR OPINION in the Soviet Union has been of interest to scholars for at least half a century, and it will undoubtedly continue to be as long as the question of people’s relation to the regime remains an issue. In what proportions did Soviet citizens support the regime, resist it, fear it, or were apathetic to it? How can researchers approach these complicated questions? What are the most useful sources for learning about the Soviet population’s perceptions of the regime? We have not, of course, been without sources on popular opinion for the past fifty years. Archives and émigré interviews in the West, such as in the captured Smolensk archive, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History at Columbia University, and the Hoover Institution Archive at Stanford University, as well as published and unpublished memoirs, have provided information on people’s outlook, as well as giving us an idea of just what issues absorbed them. All of these sources are useful. But the materials in these collections are insufficient in quantity, recorded events long after the fact, or come from regions that did not include a heterogeneous mix of the population. Newly published or discovered diaries represent an additional source of information on people’s beliefs during the Stalin years.1 The latter are especially helpful in delineating an individual’s personal development over a period of time. Another more recently available — but quickly * I would like to thank Andrea Graziosi and Anatol Shmelev for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.