Stalin's History of the Soviet Union Summary
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State Composers and the Red Courtiers: Music, Ideology, and Politics in the Soviet 1930S
JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN HUMANITIES 78 Simo Mikkonen State Composers and the Red Courtiers Music, Ideology, and Politics in the Soviet 1930s JYVÄSKYLÄN YLIOPISTO JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN HUMANITIES 78 Simo Mikkonen State Composers and the Red Courtiers Music, Ideology, and Politics in the Soviet 1930s Esitetään Jyväskylän yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan suostumuksella julkisesti tarkastettavaksi yliopiston Villa Ranan Blomstedtin salissa marraskuun 24. päivänä 2007 kello 12. Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by permission of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Jyväskylä, in the Building Villa Rana, Blomstedt Hall, on November 24, 2007 at 12 o'clock noon. UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ JYVÄSKYLÄ 2007 State Composers and the Red Courtiers Music, Ideology, and Politics in the Soviet 1930s JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN HUMANITIES 78 Simo Mikkonen State Composers and the Red Courtiers Music, Ideology, and Politics in the Soviet 1930s UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ JYVÄSKYLÄ 2007 Editors Seppo Zetterberg Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä Irene Ylönen, Marja-Leena Tynkkynen Publishing Unit, University Library of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities Editorial Board Editor in Chief Heikki Hanka, Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä Petri Karonen, Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä Matti Rahkonen, Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä Petri Toiviainen, Department of Music, University of Jyväskylä Minna-Riitta Luukka, Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä Raimo Salokangas, Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä URN:ISBN:9789513930158 ISBN 978-951-39-3015-8 (PDF) ISBN 978-951-39-2990-9 (nid.) ISSN 1459-4331 Copyright ©2007 , by University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä University Printing House, Jyväskylä 2007 ABSTRACT Mikkonen, Simo State composers and the red courtiers. -
Soviet Censorship Policy from a Musician's Perspective
The View from an Open Window: Soviet Censorship Policy from a Musician’s Perspective By Danica Wong David Brodbeck, Ph.D. Departments of Music and European Studies Jayne Lewis, Ph.D. Department of English A Thesis Submitted in Partial Completion of the Certification Requirements for the Honors Program of the School of Humanities University of California, Irvine 24 May 2019 i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract iii Introduction 1 The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich 9 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District 10 The Fifth Symphony 17 The Music of Sergei Prokofiev 23 Alexander Nevsky 24 Zdravitsa 30 Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and The Crisis of 1948 35 Vano Muradeli and The Great Fellowship 35 The Zhdanov Affair 38 Conclusion 41 Bibliography 44 ii Acknowledgements While this world has been marked across time by the silenced and the silencers, there have always been and continue to be the supporters who work to help others achieve their dreams and communicate what they believe to be vital in their own lives. I am fortunate enough have a background and live in a place where my voice can be heard without much opposition, but this thesis could not have been completed without the immeasurable support I received from a variety of individuals and groups. First, I must extend my utmost gratitude to my primary advisor, Dr. David Brodbeck. I did not think that I would be able to find a humanities faculty member so in tune with both history and music, but to my great surprise and delight, I found the perfect advisor for my project. -
The Socialist Soviet Republic of Scandinavia
Ajalooline Ajakiri, 2015, 3 (153), 287–326 The Socialist Soviet Republic of Scandinavia Ainur Elmgren ABSTRACT Nationalist and regionalist geopolitical concepts were appropriated in the ser- vice of Communist world revolution by Finnish activists in Sweden, Finland, and Soviet Karelia. The influence of Social Democratic statesman and scholar of geopolitics, Väinö Voionmaa, can be traced in the negotiations that led to the foundation of an autonomous Karelian Labour Commune in 1921. Exiled Finnish revolutionaries persuaded the Bolsheviks that Karelia could become a stepping-stone towards revolution in Finland and Scandinavia. A greater So- cialist Soviet Republic of Scandinavia, united by cultural, geographical and eco- nomical factors, would monopolize the timber market and exercise economic power over Western Europe. The idea of a Scandinavian revolution was aban- doned along with the idea of world revolution in the mid-1920s. The last men- tions of a Soviet Scandinavia can be found in anti-Soviet propaganda long after the demise of its promoters in the Great Terror. Keywords: geopolitics, revolution, regionalism, nationalism, Scandinavia, So- viet Union, Karelian Labour Commune The pursuit of a “Greater Finland” is a well-known chapter in the history of Finnish nationalism. The Greater Finland project uniting the “tribal brothers” of Finland and Karelia, sometimes also the national irredenta of the border regions in Northern Sweden and Norway, the Kola Penin- sula and the Finno-Ugric minorities of Russia, was practically monopo- lized by right-wing intellectual movements after Finland’s independence in 1917 and the subsequent civil war.1 However, it had inspired politicians and scholars identifying as Socialist before, and it would continue to do so. -
Iuliia Kysla
Rethinking the Postwar Era: Soviet Ukrainian Writers Under Late Stalinism, 1945-1949 by Iuliia Kysla A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Department of History and Classics University of Alberta © Iuliia Kysla, 2018 Abstract This dissertation advances the study of late Stalinism, which has until recently been regarded as a bizarre appendage to Stalin’s rule, and aims to answer the question of whether late Stalinism was a rupture with or continuation of its prewar precursor. I analyze the reintegration of Ukrainian writers into the postwar Soviet polity and their adaptation to the new realities following the dramatic upheavals of war. Focusing on two parallel case studies, Lviv and Kyiv, this study explores how the Soviet regime worked with members of the intelligentsia in these two cities after 1945, at a time when both sides were engaged in “identification games.” This dissertation demonstrates that, despite the regime’s obsession with control, there was some room for independent action on the part of Ukrainian writers and other intellectuals. Authors exploited gaps in Soviet discourse to reclaim agency, which they used as a vehicle to promote their own cultural agendas. Unlike the 1930s, when all official writers had to internalize the tropes of Soviet culture, in the postwar years there was some flexibility in an author’s ability to accept or reject the Soviet system. Moreover, this dissertation suggests that Stalin’s postwar cultural policy—unlike the strategies of the 1930s, which relied predominantly on coercive tactics—was defined mainly by discipline by humiliation, which often involved bullying and threatening members of the creative intelligentsia. -
The Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine: Toward New Avenues Of
THE GREAT FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE: TOWARD NEW AVENUES OF INQUIRY INTO THE HOLODOMOR A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the North Dakota State University of Agriculture and Applied Science By Troy Philip Reisenauer In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major Department: History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies June 2014 Fargo, North Dakota North Dakota State University Graduate School Title THE GREAT FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE: TOWARD NEW AVENUES OF INQUIRY INTO THE HOLODOMOR By Troy Philip Reisenauer The Supervisory Committee certifies that this disquisition complies with North Dakota State University’s regulations and meets the accepted standards for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: Dr. John K. Cox Chair Dr. Tracy Barrett Dr. Dragan Miljkovic Approved: July 10, 2014 Dr. John K. Cox Date Department Chair ABSTRACT Famine spread across the Union of Social Soviet Republics in 1932 and 1933, a deadly though unanticipated consequence of Joseph Stalin’s attempt in 1928 to build socialism in one country through massive industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture known as the first Five-Year Plan. This study uses published documents, collections, correspondence, memoirs, secondary sources and new insight to analyze the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and other Soviet republics. It presents the major scholarly works on the famine, research that often mirrors the diverse views and bitter public disagreement over the issue of intentionality and the ultimate culpability of Soviet leadership. The original contribution of this study is in the analysis of newly published primary documents of the 1920s and 1930s from the Russian Presidential Archives, especially vis-à-vis the role of Stalin and his chief lieutenants at the center of power and the various representatives at the republic-level periphery. -
1 Life Between Two Panels Soviet Nonconformism in the Cold War Era
Life Between Two Panels Soviet Nonconformism in the Cold War Era DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Clinton J. Buhler, M.A. Graduate Program in History of Art * * * * * The Ohio State University 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Myroslava M. Mudrak, Advisor Dr. Kris Paulsen Dr. Jessie Labov Dr. Aron Vinegar 1 Copyright by Clinton J. Buhler 2013 2 Abstract Beneath the façade of total conformity in the Soviet Union, a dynamic underground community of artists and intellectuals worked in forced isolation. Rejecting the mandates of state-sanctioned Socialist Realist art, these dissident artists pursued diverse creative directions in their private practice. When they attempted to display their work publicly in 1974, the carefully crafted façade of Soviet society cracked, and the West became aware of a politically subversive undercurrent in Soviet cultural life. Responding to the international condemnation of the censorship, Soviet officials allowed and encouraged the emigration of the nonconformist artists to the West. This dissertation analyzes the foundation and growth of the nonconformist artistic movement in the Soviet Union, focusing on a key group of artists who reached artistic maturity in the Brezhnev era and began forging connections in the West. The first two chapters of the dissertation center on works that were, by and large, produced before emigration to the West. In particular, I explore the growing awareness of artists like Oleg Vassiliev of their native artistic heritage, especially the work of Russian avant-garde artists like Kazimir Malevich. I look at how Vassiliev, in a search for an alternative form of expression to the mandated form of art, took up the legacy of nineteenth-century Realism, avant-garde abstraction, and Socialist Realism. -
On 10 March 1952, the Soviet Leader Iosif Stalin Proposed—Or
RuggentThe 1952ha Stalerlin Note on German Unification The 1952 Stalin Note on German Uniªcation The Ongoing Debate ✣ Peter Ruggenthaler On 10 March 1952, the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin proposed—or seemed to propose—a peace treaty that made the reuniªcation of Germany contingent on establishing a neutral status for the country, an offer that sur- prised much of the world and seemed appealing on the surface. In Moscow, Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko handed identi- cally worded notes containing a draft version of a German peace treaty to dip- lomatic representatives of the Western powers (the United States, Great Brit- ain, and France). Politicians, diplomats, and, above all, historians have long debated whether Stalin was sincere about the goals he laid out in the so-called Stalin Note.1 In the ensuing “Battle of Notes” that dragged on well into the autumn of 1952, the U.S., British, and French governments declined to engage with Sta- lin’s offer and demanded instead binding guarantees that free elections be held everywhere in Germany. After years in which the Soviet Union had shown it- self averse to holding free elections in Germany, Western leaders considered Stalin’s “offer” a propaganda coup at best and a proposal fraught with dangers at worst. Washington in particular was unwilling to abandon the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) with the West. The treaties that were to make West Germany part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) via the European Defense Community (EDC) were ready for sign- ing.2 Relationships between Western governments and the USSR had been 1. -
On War and the Winter War Robert Karnisky
Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 On War and the Winter War Robert Karnisky Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ON WAR AND THE WINTER WAR by Robert Karnisky A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007 The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Robert B. Karnisky defended on June 29, 2007. ________________________ Jonathan Grant Professor Directing Thesis ________________________ Michael Creswell Committee Member ________________________ James P. Jones Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of my committee. These include my graduate professor, Dr. Jonathan Grant, for his advice during the writing of this work, his entertaining lectures, and especially for his patience; Dr. Michael Creswell, for introducing me to military affairs and for encouraging me to pursue this topic; and Dr. James P. Jones, for his continued interest in my academic progress, and for his fifty years of teaching at Florida State. The remaining members of the faculty and staff at FSU deserve recognition for too many reasons to be recounted here – but most of all for making my experience here so enjoyable. Rarely does someone in my circumstance receive the opportunity I have been given, and I will never forget the people who made it such a positive one. -
All Stalin's Men? Soldierly Masculinities in the Soviet
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository ALL STALIN’S MEN? SOLDIERLY MASCULINITIES IN THE SOVIET WAR EFFORT, 1938-1945 BY STEVEN GEORGE JUG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Diane Koenker, Chair Professor Mark Steinberg Associate Professor Mark Micale Associate Professor John Randolph ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the different but interconnected ways Soviet leaders and citizen-soldiers interpreted the Soviet war effort as a masculine endeavor. At the front, the entry of women into the ranks of combatants challenged not only men’s preeminence, but also official and popular narratives of a masculine ethic of national defense that stretched back to the Russian Revolution. The chapters of this dissertation explore the ways in which masculine values and priorities from the 1930s persisted in the Red Army despite the distinguished service of female combatants and divisions among male soldiers, commanders, and propagandists. Motives and actions such as hating and killing, comradeship and revenge, or serving Stalin and using skill, appeared as exclusively masculine in frontline culture, in contrast to depictions of vulnerable women as non-combatants and passive victims in the civilian realm. Analyzing Russian archival materials, military newspapers, and soldiers’ letters and memoirs, this study investigates the interaction and evolution of official and popular notions of soldiers and heroes as masculine subjects. -
Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of D
Re/fashionin2 the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of D 'talinisation, 1953-1964 Miriam Jane Dobson Thesis presented for PhD examination at University College London, July 2003 Abstract This dissertation explores the evolution of Soviet public culture during the decade of destalinisation that followed the great break of 1953. It was a period both of intense political change, as the party sought to create new kinds of legitimacy post-Stalin, and of major social upheaval as millions of prisoners returned from the Gulag to the Soviet mainland. Destalinisation is examined here as a dialogue between three actors: the state, the Soviet public, and the returning masses once regarded as society's outcasts. Recasting the notion of the 'enemy' was central to this re-conceptualisation of public culture. The enemy had long held a powerful place in the Soviet political imagination. In revolutionary cosmogony, the world was locked in a battle between socialism and capitalism in which good would finally triumph yielding a communist paradise on earth. Where loathing of the enemy had prevailed under Stalin, his successors sought to create a more moderate culture, claiming victory was near and the advent of communism imminent. After 1953, the vilification of political opponents waned, calls for vigilance lessened, and the rabid invective cultivated by the Stalinist press began to subside. The binary division of the Soviet realm into two 'zones' - one for Soviet citizens, a second for its demonic outcasts - was eroded. The thesis explores the complex nature of these changes. It examines the contribution of Gulag returnees who sought to recreate themselves as decent Soviet citizens, but who brought with them the culture of this segregated, other world. -
The Disloyal Patron?
DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR NUMBER 166 STALIN: THE DISLOYAL PATRON? by T. H. Rigby Fellow, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies Colloquium Paper June 10, 1983 Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Washington, D.C. STALIN: THE DISLOYAL PATRON? Stalin's victory in the power struggles of the 1920s owed a great deal to his success in building up and deploying a vast patronage network while maneuvering his chief clients into key positions, but once he had achieved supreme power he proved a fickle and disloyal patron. In the words Charles de Gaulle is said to have used of himself, he confound his supporters with his ingratitutde. With the exception of the egregious Vyacheslav Molotov and perhaps one or two other hatchet-men, Stalin was constantly discarding his older supporters once they had served their purpose or run foul of his morbid suspicion or arbitrary ill-will and replacing them with younger and ever more pliable adherents who rode high for a few months or a few years before they, too, were consigned to oblivion. This is the conventional wisdom, and it contains a most important element of truth, to which there are some impressive witnesses, beginning with Lenin who in his so-called 'Testament' dwelt specifically on Stalin's capriciousness and disloyalty. Khrushchev has left many bitter words in his secret report to the Twentieth Congress and in his memoirs about his old boss's arbitrary, suspicious and cruel treatment of his entourage. Over forty years ago Boris Souvarine in his still invaluable biography of Stalin summed it up as follow·s: 1 2 Stalin incites and provokes his auxiliaries, stirs up rival passions, exploits rancour and hatred in order to guarantee in his own way the continuance of his despotism and the unique position of the supreme arbiter. -
Sex and Soviet Power in the Gulag of Western Siberia Love and Sex Were
Sex and Soviet Power in the Gulag of Western Siberia Wilson T. Bell Visiting Instructor of Russian and European History, Dickinson College ABD, Department of History, University of Toronto Paper for presentation at the International Young Researchers Conference on the “Gulag in History and Memory,” Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. October 28-30, 2010 Not for citation without the author’s permission. Love and sex were common in the Gulag camps.1 This was due to the structure of individual camps, which had difficulty separating men from women prisoners; to the unwillingness or inability of the regime to punish every disciplinary infraction on the part of camp personnel, thus encouraging arbitrary and abusive behavior towards prisoners; and to an ambiguous relationship towards sexual activity in the camps, despite clear concern about high pregnancy rates, the difficulty of using pregnant women and nursing mothers in camp economic activity, and concern about the upkeep of children born in the camps themselves. The issues surrounding heterosexual sex in the camps ultimately underscore the Gulag’s inefficient day-to-day operations and serve to highlight a key difference between the Soviet and the Nazi camps, as the care for children and mothers— however minimal and, in many instances, cruel—stands in stark contrast to Nazi policies of forced abortions and/or summary death sentences. 1 Although GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), or Main Administration of Camps, was technically in charge of running the special settlements until 1944, the present paper does not discuss the settlements, focusing instead on the labor camps and colonies.