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1
Bruyneel, Stephen Alan. "The future of Soviet domestic reform : an analysis of three sovietologists' views." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/28587.
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This thesis had two related purposes: to compare, contrast and critique three scholars' views of the Soviet domestic reform process, and to use these analyses as the means by which to examine the emerging Soviet domestic reform program. The arguments of Stephen F. Cohen, Timothy J. Colton and Richard Pipes served as the primary subject matter of this thesis, with their individual views determined by a critical analysis of the writing which each has recently done on this subject. Investigated in particular was each individuals' interpretation of the reform process, its component parts and the kind of change that was expected to be involved in any new domestic reforms. The final chapter dealing with the contemporary Soviet situation relied upon as much primary source material as possible in an attempt to provide an accurate picture of the state of affairs within the country at this time.
The results of my analysis indicate that Richard Pipes' interpretations and conclusions do not receive much support from either Soviet history or the contemporary situation within the country. His one dimensional view of Soviet elite interests and his "crisis/reform" theory of Soviet reform were found to be generally unsubstantiated. Stephen Cohen's arguments, on the other hand, received a good deal of support, especially with regards to his emphasis on the probability of moderate change and the existence of reformist and conservative constituencies within the Soviet Union, constituencies which do appear to have been involved in the domestic reform process. At the same time, however, the terminology which he employed to describe the reform process was found to be somewhat problematic. Timothy Colton's arguments, finally, were also found to have a good deal of efficacy, especially with respect to his view of the country's new generation of political leadership and the role that it would play in the reform process. In conclusion, the new domestic reform program itself was found to be indicative of generally moderate economic and political change, change that was embraced for the moat part by a good segment of the new leadership, but which had found significant resistance at the lower levels of the bureaucracy and among the working class.Arts, Faculty of
Political Science, Department of
Graduate
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Bennett, Jeffrey D. "Rising to the occasion : the changing role of the KGB and its influence in Soviet succession struggles 1953-1991." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23324.
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After having reached a level of influence unmatched by any other element of Soviet government under Stalin and Beria, the security organs of the Soviet Union proved difficult to tame. While it has been argued that the KGB was made subservient to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the ascent of Khrushchev in the late 1950's, this essay will attempt to show that the security police apparatus was able to maintain a high level of prominence and even autonomy throughout the history of the Soviet Union and beyond. While it may have appeared that the organs were under constraints during periods of unchallenged leadership, the lack of a legislative definition of the KGB's role made the possibility of a coup or putsch a constant threat. During periods of instability, particularly those surrounding the succession struggles, the KGB was able to act independently and was highly influential as to the outcome of these contests. In the latter years of the Soviet era, efforts to alter the system in order to avoid the excesses of previous years revealed the organs to be highly adaptable and cognizant of the need to change to avoid being excluded from the political decision-making process. Through an assessment of the various succession struggles and efforts to place the organs within the confines of legality, the political power of the KGB may be better understood, and placed in a historical perspective side by side with its post-Soviet counterpart, which too is shown to have survived recent upheavals.
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Copp, John W. "Egypt and the Soviet Union, 1953-1970." PDXScholar, 1986. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3797.
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The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze in detail the many aspects of the Soviet-Egyptian friendship as it developed from 1953 to 1970. The relationship between the two is extremely important because it provides insight into the roles of both Egypt and the Soviet Union in both the history of the Middle East and in world politics. The period from 1953 to 1970 is key in understanding the relationship between the two states because it is the period of the genesis of the relationship and a period in which both nations went through marked changes in both internal policy and their external relations.
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YAKUSHENKO, Olga. "Building connections, distorting meanings : Soviet architecture and the West, 1953-1979." Doctoral thesis, European University Institute, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/1814/71643.
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Defence date: 26 April 2021Examining 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’
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Kashirin, Alexander Urievich 1963. "Protestant minorities in the Soviet Ukraine, 1945--1991." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10956.
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xiv, 934 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.The dissertation focuses on Protestants in the Soviet Ukraine from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. It has two major aims. The first is to elucidate the evolution of Soviet policy toward Protestant denominations, using archival evidence that was not available to previous students of this subject. The second is to reconstruct the internal life of Protestant congregations as marginalized social groups. The dissertation is thus a case study both of religious persecution under state-sponsored atheism and of the efforts of individual believers and their communities to survive without compromising their religious principles. The opportunity to function legally came at a cost to Protestant communities in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR. In the 1940s-1980s, Protestant communities lived within a tight encirclement of numerous governmental restrictions designed to contain and, ultimately, reduce all manifestations of religiosity in the republic both quantitatively and qualitatively. The Soviet state specifically focused on interrupting the generational continuity of religious tradition by driving a wedge between believing parents and their children. Aware of these technologies of containment and their purpose, Protestants devised a variety of survival strategies that allowed them, when possible, to circumvent the stifling effects of containment and ensure the preservation and transmission of religious traditions to the next generation. The dissertation investigates how the Soviet government exploited the state institutions and ecclesiastic structures in its effort to transform communities of believers into malleable societies of timid and nominal Christians and how the diverse Protestant communities responded to this challenge. Faced with serious ethical choices--to collaborate with the government or resist its persistent interference in the internal affairs of their communities-- many Ukrainian Evangelicals joined the vocal opposition movement that contributed to an increased international pressure on the Soviet government and subsequent evolution of the Soviet policy from confrontation to co-existence with religion. The dissertation examines both theoretical and practical aspects of the Soviet secularization project and advances a number of arguments that help account for religion's survival in the Soviet Union during the 1940-1980s.
Committee in charge: Julie Hessler, Chairperson, History; R Alan Kimball, Member, History; Jack Maddex, Member, History; William Husband, Member, Not from U of O Caleb Southworth, Outside Member, Sociology
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Thieme, Ulrike. "Armed peace : the Foreign Office and the Soviet Union, 1945-1953." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1735/.
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This thesis examines the role of the Northern Department of the British Foreign Office and its perception of, and attitude towards, the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1953. In these formative years after World War II many assumptions and policies were shaped that proved decisive for years to come. The Northern Department of the Foreign Office was at the centre of British dealings with the Soviet Union after 1945 in an atmosphere of cooling diplomatic relations between both camps. Keeping channels of communications open in order to exploit every opportunity for negotiation and the settlement of post-war issues, officials built up an extensive expertise of Soviet domestic and foreign policy. Their focus on all aspects of Soviet life accessible to them, for example, Soviet domestic and international propaganda, revealed in their view a significant emerging future threat to British interests in Europe and worldwide. This view provided the basis of the analysis of new information and the assessment of the best possible policy options for the British government. The Northern Department tried to exploit those traits of Soviet policy that could persuade the USA and Western Europe to follow British foreign policy initiatives vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the early Cold War while attempting to balance those weaknesses that could harm this effort. The focus of the Department often varied as a result of Soviet action. Some issues, like the Cominform were of momentary importance while other issues, like the Communist threat and the issue of Western European defence remained on the agenda for many years. A realistic approach to foreign policy allowed officials to exploit and counter-act those Soviet foreign policies seen as most threatening to Britain and those most likely to aid Britain’s recovery of her much desired world role. While the initial optimism after 1945 soon faded and consolidation on both sides was followed by confrontation, officials in London and the embassy in Moscow tried to maintain diplomatic relations to aid Western recovery efforts and support the new foreign policy doctrine of containment. When by the early 1950s entrenchment was speeding up in East and West, the Northern Department nevertheless utilised the available information to support British foreign policy worldwide as well as strengthen the domestic effort to explain the increasing international tension to the British people. Realism on the part of officials, and awareness of the information and options available to them meant that a Britain closely allied to the USA but one that continued to talk to the Kremlin was seen as the best way to achieve a continued world role for Britain and a safe Europe.
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Dreeze, Jonathon Randall. "Stalin's Empire: Soviet Propaganda in Kazakhstan, 1929-1953." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu158757030976164.
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Barry, William Patrick. "The missile design bureaux and Soviet manned space policy, 1953-1970." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f2b8544f-5852-4283-b7ac-892afc6f39ae.
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The Soviet manned space programme is one of the most impressive and mysterious legacies of the Soviet Union. Evidence that has come to light since 1989 throws considerable doubt on earlier Western understanding of the Soviet space effort. One of the more puzzling aspects of the new data is the claim that the Chief Designers of several missile design bureaux played a pivotal role in the making of Soviet manned space policy. This claim contradicts much of what was thought to be known about the Soviet space programme, their research and development system, and Soviet politics generally. This dissertation is an empirical study that seeks to answer four interrelated questions. 1. What major manned space projects did the Soviet Union engage in during the 1960s, and how were these projects authorised? 2. Did the Chief Designers play an influential role in the promotion, selection, approval, and implementation of these projects? 3. What were the overall objectives and purposes of the Soviet manned space programme? 4. What does the example of Soviet space policy tell us about the Soviet political system? The examination of institutions, individuals, and the policymaking process has led to the following conclusions. The Soviet manned space programme was an extremely limited state undertaking until 1964. Prior to Khrushchev's ouster, the Soviet Union began several manned lunar space programmes designed to upstage the US Apollo moon landing effort. When all of these efforts failed by 1969, Soviet manned space policy was re-directed toward orbital space stations. One Chief Designer, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, played a central role in establishing the Soviet manned space programme. However, the ability Chief Designers to influence space policy was systematically restricted after 1960. The manned space programme was essentially a political programme. Throughout the 1960s, it was effectively controlled by a handful of top party leaders to achieve their domestic and international political objectives.
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Choate, Ksenia. "From "Stalinkas" to "Khrushchevkas": The Transition to Minimalism in Urban Residential Interiors in the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964." DigitalCommons@USU, 2010. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/628.
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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.
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Seward, James W. "The German exile journal Das Wort and the Soviet Union." PDXScholar, 1990. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4104.
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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.
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Yordanov, Radoslav. "Soviet involvement in Ethiopia and Somalia, 1947-1991." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0c66a287-9ae8-4dcf-badc-a72bf04f399f.
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Soviet-Third World relations during the Cold War are still not clearly understood. Largely based on previously unused primary material, this study aims to fill this gap in knowledge by emphasising the interplay between domestic, local, regional, and global dimensions in analysing Moscow’s involvement in the Horn of Africa. By offering a detailed examination of Soviet involvement in Somalia and Ethiopia during the Cold War, this thesis aims to shed light on the factors, shaping Moscow’s policies in the area. While it does not lay any claim of representativeness for other Third World regions, this thesis aims to highlight the intricate interplay between ideology and realpolitik in the making of Soviet foreign policy. Additionally, it tries to determine to what extent the ‘local pull,’ exerted by both Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, as well as by Soviet and other Bloc diplomats, informed the Kremlin’s policy in the area. This thesis shows that the two main strands of Moscow’s foreign policy, the pragmatic statist line and the ideological Cominternist approach, were not in conflict with one another. Instead, they were amalgamated into a flexible tactical approach, designed to maximise Soviet influence by whatever means available, along the path of least resistance. Another strand in the argument is interwoven with the pericentric framework for the study of the Cold War. While accepting recent interpretations of superpower-Third World relations, this research develops a more nuanced account of the centre-periphery interaction. The act of local engagement was Moscow’s initiative, in accord with its wider geo-political plans. Once engaged, the local actors proved instrumental in informing the Kremlin’s exercise of maintaining a presence. As with its entry, Moscow’s disengagement was predicated on strategic considerations. The period of perestroika, assigned the Third World lower priority in the Kremlin’s global agenda, engendering a withdrawal from the Horn.
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Ushay, Joshua Levi. "Paul H. Nitze and American Cold War strategy 1949 - 1953." Queensland University of Technology, 2006. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16228/.
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This study is an intellectual history of Paul H. Nitze's contribution to the evolution of American Cold War strategy from 1949 to 1953. Nitze, a national security advisor and arms control negotiator to a succession of American presidents over fifty years, was almost unrivalled in his breadth and depth of experience in the Cold War national security establishment of the United States. As this study demonstrates, however, the most important and influential phase of his career was during his involvement with the Truman administration, as Deputy Director and then Director of the Department of State's Policy Planning Staff (PPS). It was in this position that Nitze contributed to a profound shift in American strategic thinking that redefined U.S. national security policy both at the time and for the decades to come. He was the principal author of National Security Council directive 68 (NSC 68), the most comprehensive and wide-ranging appraisal of American national security policy of the time. Developed in response to the Soviet Union's first atomic explosion, and approved after the North Korean invasion of South Korea, Nitze's NSC 68 recommended the United States move away from its prevailing strategy of massive nuclear retaliation and towards a forward defence of the' free world', made possible by a vast increase in conventional - or non-nuclear - military capabilities. This shift proved to be the forerunner of 'flexible response', the official defence posture of the Kennedy administration and the formal NATO strategic doctrine for much of the Cold War. Yet crucially, the phase of Nitze's career that produced this fundamental and enduring reorientation of American Cold War strategy has been largely unexplored by historical studies to date. This thesis addresses this shortcoming. Not only is it the first in-depth study of Nitze's years with the Truman administration, but it also makes use of previously unavailable archival sources, including Nitze's own papers held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Given the dearth of literature on his career during this time, and the fact that the critical primary source material used in this study is absent in such literature, this thesis therefore offers a new, original and unprecedented contribution to contemporary understanding of Paul Nitze and the Cold War.
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Ushay, Josh. "Paul H. Nitze and American Cold War strategy 1949 - 1953." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2006. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/16228/1/Josh_Ushay_Thesis.pdf.
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This study is an intellectual history of Paul H. Nitze's contribution to the evolution of American Cold War strategy from 1949 to 1953. Nitze, a national security advisor and arms control negotiator to a succession of American presidents over fifty years, was almost unrivalled in his breadth and depth of experience in the Cold War national security establishment of the United States. As this study demonstrates, however, the most important and influential phase of his career was during his involvement with the Truman administration, as Deputy Director and then Director of the Department of State's Policy Planning Staff (PPS). It was in this position that Nitze contributed to a profound shift in American strategic thinking that redefined U.S. national security policy both at the time and for the decades to come. He was the principal author of National Security Council directive 68 (NSC 68), the most comprehensive and wide-ranging appraisal of American national security policy of the time. Developed in response to the Soviet Union's first atomic explosion, and approved after the North Korean invasion of South Korea, Nitze's NSC 68 recommended the United States move away from its prevailing strategy of massive nuclear retaliation and towards a forward defence of the' free world', made possible by a vast increase in conventional - or non-nuclear - military capabilities. This shift proved to be the forerunner of 'flexible response', the official defence posture of the Kennedy administration and the formal NATO strategic doctrine for much of the Cold War. Yet crucially, the phase of Nitze's career that produced this fundamental and enduring reorientation of American Cold War strategy has been largely unexplored by historical studies to date.
This thesis addresses this shortcoming. Not only is it the first in-depth study of Nitze's years with the Truman administration, but it also makes use of previously unavailable archival sources, including Nitze's own papers held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Given the dearth of literature on his career during this time, and the fact that the critical primary source material used in this study is absent in such literature, this thesis therefore offers a new, original and unprecedented contribution to contemporary understanding of Paul Nitze and the Cold War.
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Tesař, Jan [Verfasser], Friedrich Wilhelm [Herausgeber] Graf, Milos [Herausgeber] Havelka, Przemysław [Herausgeber] Matusik, and Wessel Martin [Herausgeber] Schulze. "The History of Scientific Atheism : A Comparative Study of Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union (1954–1991) / Jan Tesař." Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. http://www.v-r.de/.
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Froggatt, Michael. "Science in propaganda and popular culture in the USSR under Khruschëv (1953-1964)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:101d4ec5-48cc-4a85-b7e9-0e5b7c8fdafd.
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This thesis is the first detailed study of the way in which science and technology were portrayed in propaganda and popular culture during the Khrushchëv period, a time when the Soviet leadership invested significant resources, both at home and abroad, in order to capitalise on its scientific achievements. It draws upon a wide range of previously unseen materials from the archives of the RSFSR Ministry of Education, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the State Committee on Radio and Television and the Central Committee of the CPSU. It provides the first archive-based analysis of the lecturing organisation 'Znanie', which was crucial to the dissemination of Soviet propaganda in the post-war period. The thesis also makes use of a variety of published sources, such as popular science publications and journals, as well as a number of Soviet films from the Khrushchëv period. The thesis examines the manner in which scientific information was disseminated to the Soviet public and the ways in which public scientific opinion was able to participate in, and influence, this process. It is shown that a general lack of institutionalised control enabled members of the scientific intelligentsia to exercise a degree of control over the content of scientific propaganda, often in a very idiosyncratic fashion. The way in which the rhetorical and ideological presentation of science changed during the Khrushchëv period (often identified as 'the Thaw') is analysed, and it is shown that while Soviet popular science did become increasingly open to foreign influence it became preoccupied with new threats, such as generational and personal conflict. The thesis also uses the available sources to consider popular responses to scientific propaganda and, in particular, whether attempts to use scientific-atheistic propaganda to create a 'materialist' worldview amongst Soviet citizens met with any success. The thesis provides detailed case studies of the use of science in Khrushchëv's atheistic campaigns, of propaganda surrounding early Soviet achievements in the space race and of the portrayal of the Lysenko controversy in the popular media.
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Telfer, Elizabeth. "Iran's foreign policy in the Caspian region 1991-1997." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3155/.
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Set in the context of the evolving political tapestry of the Caspian region, encompassing the five riparian states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia, and their immediate neighbours in the South Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia) and Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) this PhD presents an analysis of Iranian foreign policy in the first six years following the Soviet break-up (1991-1997), an era that overlapped with the administration of President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989-1997). This thesis aims to build upon two distinct areas of current scholarship creating linkages between Tehran’s domestic and external environment between 1988 and 1991 which resulted in the comprehensive pragmatist alliance and the emergence of opportunities in the Caspian after the Cold War. The crux is that Rafsanjani’s material interests were aligned with the changing geopolitics of its northern region, inducing an Iranian policy driven by a pragmatic construction of strategic concerns.
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Uhl, Katharina Barbara. "Building communism : the Young Communist League during the Soviet thaw period, 1953-1964." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:485213b3-415d-4bc1-a896-ea53983c75f8.
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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.
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Carter, Charles William. "The Importance of Osthandel: West German-Soviet Trade and the End of the Cold War, 1969-1991." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1346850432.
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Yilmaz, S. Harun. "Construction of national identities in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine in Soviet historiography (1936-1953)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5694552d-67e7-4d03-8011-cb01b1c8caa8.
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This dissertation aims to explain how Soviet national historiographies were constructed in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, in 1936-1953 and what the political and ideological reasons were behind the way they were written. The dissertation aims to contribute to current scholarship on Soviet nationality policies; on Stalinist nation-building projects; and to the debate on whether the Soviet period was a project of developmentalist modernization or not. This dissertation aims to examine the process of national history writing in three republics from the local point of view, by using the local archival sources. For this research, archival materials that have been overlooked by scholars up to this point from the archives of the communist parties, academy of sciences, and central state archives in Kiev, Ukraine, Baku, Azerbaijan, and Almaty, Kazakhstan have been collected. The timeline starts with Zhdanov’s commission in 1936, which summoned historians and ideologues of the Communist Party in Moscow to write an all-Union history because a parallel campaign of writing national histories had been initialized by the local communist parties. The first two chapters cover the pre-war (1936-1941) period, when national histories were written after the demise of Pokrovskiian historiography. Although there was one ideology, there were different preferences in solving the problem of ethnogenesis, defining national heroes, and also different preferences among the sections of the past that national histories emphasized. The third chapter explains the construction of national histories during the war period (1941-1945). The chapter also presents how national histories were used for wartime propaganda. Finally, the last chapter is about the post-war discussions and the shift of emphasis from ‘national’ to ‘class’ that occurred in the non-Russian national narratives in the Zhdanovshchina period. While there was an ‘imperial design’ for the necessities of managing a multi-national state, the Soviet Union also appears as a modernization project for all three cases by constructing national narratives. Though non-Russian Soviet historiographies produced contradictory narratives in different decades, they also homogenized, codified and nationalized the narrative of the past. Regional, dynastic, religious, tribal figures and events incorporated into grandiose national narratives. Nations were primordialized and their national identities armed with spatial and temporal indigenousness within the borders of their national republics. Modern national identities of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gained from this homogenization and codification by the Soviet regime. Although modernism is not only about construction of national narratives, the latter points out the developmental and modernizing character of the Soviet period.
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Yan, Ji Bao. "China's policies toward the Soviet Union and the United States before and in the Korean War." PDXScholar, 1994. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3572.
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This thesis deals with China's policy making toward both the Soviet Union and the United States in late 1949 and early 1950 and how they made the decision to enter the conflict, by making use of recently declassified Chinese sources and available American sources.
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Miller, Gregory Blake 1969. "Reentry shock: Historical transition and temporal longing in the cinema of the Soviet Thaw." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11059.
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xii, 310 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.Nostalgia is the longing for a lost, and often substantially reimagined, time or place. Commonly regarded as a conservative impulse available for exploitation by hegemonic forces, nostalgia can also be a source of social questioning and creative inspiration. This dissertation examines the ways in which nostalgic longing imports images and ideas from memory into present discourse and infuses works of art with complication, contradiction, and ambiguity. In the early 1960s, emboldened by Nikita Khrushchev's cultural Thaw, many Soviet filmmakers engaged both personal and social memory to craft challenging reflections of and responses to their times. These filmmakers reengaged the sundered spirit of the 1920s avant-garde and reimagined the nation's artistic and spiritual heritage; they captured the passing moments of contemporary history in a way that animated the permanent, productive, and sometimes stormy dialogue between the present and the persistent past. Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba (1964), Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966, released 1971), and Marlen Khutsiev's Ilich's Gate (1961, released with changes in 1965 as I Am Twenty ) were planned in the anxious years surrounding Khrushchev's fall, and the films mark a high point of Thaw-era cinematic audacity. Each film is epic in scope; each deploys temporal longing to generate narrative ambiguity and dialogue between historical epochs. The films are haunted by ghosts; they challenge the hegemony of the "now" by insisting on the phantom presence of a thousand "thens"; they refurbish old dreams and question contemporary assumptions. The Thaw permitted the intrusion of private memory into public history, and the past became a zone for exploration rather than justification. Easy answers became harder to come by, but the profusion of questions and suggestions created a brief silver age for Soviet cinema. For us, these films offer an extraordinary glimpse into creative life during one of the great, unsung social transitions of the 20th century and reveal the crucial contribution of individual memory in the artistic quest for formal diversity, spiritual inspiration, and ethical living.
Committee in Charge: Dr. H. Leslie Steeves, Chair; Dr. Biswarup Sen; Dr. Julianne Newton; Dr. Jenifer Presto
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Gundrum, Duane A. "(Neo) revolutionary messages : an analysis of the impact of counter-narratives versus state narratives during the 1991 Coup D'etat in the former Soviet Union." Scholarly Commons, 2008. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/685.
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On August 19, 1991, government hard-liners overthrew the Soviet Union for a period of 72 hours. Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, staged a protest on the steps of the Russian White House, where he gave speeches against the coup d'etat, releasing these speeches for dissemination between the hard-liners and the masses gathered to support Yeltsin. Yeltsin 's protest created a constituted identity amongst the people gathered who became part of the protest against the government. This created a confrontation between the two publics, where the state message developed a narrative involving a glorified past to which they wished to return, while the counter-public created a counter-narrative that argued a future of continued reforms would benefit the people of Russia and the Soviet Union. In the end, the counter-narrative achieved stronger approval from the masses, essentially replacing the state's narrative with its own. As a result, the hard-liners lost their grab for power, and Yeltsin emerged the winner in an ideological struggle for the future of the Russia and the Soviet Union.
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Svensson, Bengt. "Seven Years That Shook Economic and Social Thinking : Reflections on the Revolution in Communist Economics 1985-1991." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-8353.
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The main theme of this study is to analyze the Soviet economic theoretical debate in the period 1985 – 1991. This period of reconstruction gave possibilities of a more free debate. In the period up to 1989/90 the directive from the Central Committee of the Communist Party was to defend the socialist economic system and its supremacy over market economics. However, certain market economic ideas were deemed as functioning methods also in a planned economic system. One of the conclusions in this thesis is that the Soviet economists failed to solve some central theoretical problems in the Soviet economy and as consequence their thinking failed to have a stabilizing effect on the socialist economic theory. The Achilles heel was how to apply the labour theory of value on a planned economy. In 1990 and 1991 the discussion was very free and now a transition to market economy was accepted by the economists. The main issue between the Soviet economists became now whether a gradual transition to market economy was to be preferred to shock therapy. The majority of the economists recommended a gradual transition. Scholars have emphasized that old stationary structures are important in Russian and Soviet history. A conclusion in this thesis is that such structures seemed to have played a role in Soviet and Russian theoretical thinking in the period 1985 – 1991.
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Åberg, Anna. "A Gap in the Grid : Attempts to introduce natural gas in Sweden 1967-1991." Doctoral thesis, KTH, Teknik- och vetenskapshistoria, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-121546.
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This thesis follows the process of introducing natural gas in Sweden and the construction of a Northern European gas grid from 1967 to 1991. Natural gas is a relatively unnoticed fuel in Sweden today, but this relative anonymity stands in contrast to an extensive historical activity that has taken place behind the scenes of Swedish energy policy. The single pipeline constructed between Denmark and Sweden in the early 1980s was both preceded and followed by many other attempts to construct a larger natural gas pipeline in the region made in the last 50 years. Åberg traces these attempts while discussing the complex and messy process of constructing and managing a transnational energy infrastructure.Åberg follows actors in Sweden and other countries in their attempts to negotiate and construct a natural gas infrastructure, and puts this process into a national as well as transnational context. The perceived risks and opportunities surrounding natural gas are examined, together with factors that have influenced the development of natural gas in a broader sense. By seeing the changing and messy natural gas projects as arenas where different actors construct and negotiate risks and opportunities, as well as contexualize the projects, Åberg shows how the natural gas sector in Sweden has evolved and taken shape.The study shows that natural gas in Sweden has suffered from unstable actor coalitions on different levels, a difficult market situation, and a changeful political context, especially with regard to energy policy. The import status of the fuel and the consequential transnationality of the natural gas infrastructure have also made the process of constructing a pipeline more complex. However, natural gas was introduced in Sweden, showing that when a strong enough actor coalition agreed that there was enough reason to warrant a natural gas introduction and was ready to join this endeavor, a connection could be achieved. This puts into question to what degree general explanations in terms of finance and policy drive energy decisions, and makes a case for showing how these explanations are adapted into their social and historical contexts in sometimes surprising ways.QC 20130507
The integration of energy markets across system and nation boundaries
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Vercauteren, Pierre. "Des politiques européennes à l'égard de l'URSS: la France, la RFA et la Grande-Bretagne de 1969 à 1989." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/211974.
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Baird, Catherine 1966. "The "third way" : Russia's religious philosophers in the West, 1917-1996." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34695.
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In 1922, the Bolshevik government expelled some 160 prominent intellectuals from Russia. Numbered among these were many of the leaders of the Religious Renaissance which had flourished since the turn of the century. They advocated a "third way": neither for the Tsarist regime nor the Bolsheviks; neither for Capitalism nor Communism; neither for Materialism nor Idealism; rather, they promoted personalist, spiritual development (Godmanhood ), Christian economic ethics (Sobornost'), and a path to knowledge informed by reason, but guided by faith (Religious-Philosophy ). Forced to join the Russian diaspora, these religious philosophers continued to advance their movement with the help of the Young Men's Christian Association. Largely at the initiative of Nikolai Berdyaev (1874--1948), they also began to interact with the French intellectual milieu in Paris in order to develop inter-confessional and cultural understandings. Although Russian religious-philosophy suffered a certain decline following World War Two, many of their writings had returned to the USSR. As Soviet intellectuals discovered these works, they gradually began to revolt against dialectical materialism, and aspire to recover the religious-philosophical tradition. In 1988, this Return was at last made possible, and religious-philosophy has been enjoying a second renaissance which continues unabated today.
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Crooker, Matthew R. "Cool Notes in an Invisible War: The Use of Radio and Music in the Cold War from 1953 to 1968." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1559565327720453.
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Ardovino, Michael. "Revisiting Eric Nordlinger: The Dynamics of Russian Civil- Military Relations in the Twentieth Century." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2001. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2918/.
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This paper examines the role that military has played in the political development of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the modern Russian Federation. By utilizing the theoretical tenets of Eric Nordlinger, this paper endeavors to update and hopefully revise his classic work in civil-military relations, Soldiers in Politics. Chapter one of this paper introduces many of the main theoretical concepts utilized in this analysis. Chapter two considers the Stalinist totalitarian penetration model that set the standard for communist governments around the world. Chapter three follows up by addressing the middle years of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Both reformed the military in its relation to the party and state and made the armed forces a more corporate and professional institution. Chapter four pinpoints the drastic changes in both the state and armed forces during Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost. The military briefly ventured to a point it never gone before by launching a short coup against the last Soviet president. Chapter five focuses on the last ten years in the Russian Federation. While still a professional organization typical of the liberal model of civil-military relations, the armed forces face great uncertainty, as economic and social problems demand more of their time and resources. Chapter six concludes by speculating on the future of Russian civilmilitary relations and reconsiders the importance of Nordlinger's elegant yet parsimonious work.
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Guillaumier, Christina. "From piano to stage : a genealogy of musical ideas in the piano works of Sergei Prokofiev (1900-c.1920)." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6451.
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This thesis is a study of Prokofiev's musical ideas as they emerge in his early writing for piano. It is concerned with elucidating the connections between Prokofiev's pianistic technique and his compositional technique. In doing so, the study explores the genealogy of composer's musical gestures and thematic ideas. Both his playing and his compositional styles have been labelled as distinctive: the thesis attempts to deconstruct that distinctiveness by pinpointing the origins of the composer's playing and compositional styles, tracing their gradual evolution into a mature idiom. The first chapter is concerned with Prokofiev's juvenilia (1898 to c. 1906). Drawing upon a large amount of previously unpublished archival resources, this chapter uncovers the original gestures and thematic ideas which characterize Prokofiev's early style. The next chapter focuses on Prokofiev's period at the St Petersburg Conservatory, tracing his development into a virtuoso pianist, examining the nature of that virtuosity and chronicling the creation of Prokofiev's performing persona. The gestures and idea- types identified in the first chapter are then examined within the context of Prokofiev's works for solo piano, his early works with orchestra and his first two major operas. Conclusions are then drawn about the nature of Prokofiev's distinctiveness, his compositional legacy and about his current position as a major twentieth-century composer.
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Zrudlo, Laurie. "Soviet foreign policy responsiveness to the external environment : Soviet-Indian relations 1968-1985." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=66111.
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Santos, Antonio Carlos dos. "Eric J. Hobsbawm e a Era do Socialismo : da Revolução Russa ao colapso da União Soviética (1917-1991)." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2011. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/12696.
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The present work rescues the reflections of the English marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm about the history of the socialism within the Brief XX Century , more specifically the soviet socialism between the year 1917, in Russia, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Beginning from his personal history as a communist activist and as an intellectual of the English Social History we outline his ideas about the socioeconomic and political conditions which originated the October of 1917 and the raise of the so called really existing socialism in the Soviet Union and East Europe, as well as its implications on the history of the XX century, on marxist thinking, and on the political strategies of the international communist movement. Using tools as the ontological conception of the marxist work identified initially by György Lukács and kept on by István Mészáros and José Chasin we tried to analyse the contribution of Hobsbawm s historiographical thinking on the fight to overcome inequalities economic and social injustices created by the hegemonic capitalist mode in the world nowadays
O presente trabalho resgata as reflexões do historiador marxista inglês Eric Hobsbawm sobre a história do socialismo no Breve Século XX , mais especificamente do socialismo de tipo soviético que se desenvolveu entre a Revolução Russa de 1917 e o colapso da União Soviética em 1991. Partindo da sua trajetória pessoal de militante comunista e intelectual de relevo da História Social Inglesa, destacamos suas ideias sobre as condições socioeconômicas e políticas que originaram o Outubro de 1917 e a construção do chamado socialismo realmente existente na União Soviética e no Leste da Europa, bem como suas implicações na história do século XX, no pensamento marxista e nas estratégias políticas do movimento comunista internacional. Municiados pela concepção ontológica da obra marxiana identificada inicialmente por György Lukács e continuada por István Mészáros e José Chasin , procuramos analisar a contribuição do pensamento historiográfico de Hobsbawm na luta pela superação das desigualdades econômicas e injustiças sociais geradas pelo sistema capitalista hegemônico atualmente no mundo
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"Aspekte van die problematiek van landbou in die U.S.S.R., 1953-1982." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14470.
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Schutte, Elizabeth Maria. "Godsdiensvervolging in die U.S.S.R. tydens die bewindstydperke van Lenin en Stalin, 1917-1953." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/10271.
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ATNASHEV, Timur. "Transformation of the political speech under perestroika : rise and fall of free agency in the changing idioms, rules and second-order statements of the emerging intellectual debates (1985-1991)." Doctoral thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/14984.
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Defence Date: 15 October 2010First made available online on 8 March 2019
Examining Board: Prof. Edward Arfon Rees, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Steve Smith, European University Institute; Prof. Oleg Kharkhordin, European University at St. Petersburg; Prof. Alexei Miller, CEU Budapest
We would like to tell the story of the transformations of the political speech during perestroika by studying the changes in the intellectual vocabulary, professed values and conventional rules of public debates. This transformation is taken in the context of the major political events and socio-economic changes. We mostly considered the theoretical essays of publicists, politicians, thinkers and researchers corresponding to the realm of intellectual history. The study is based on the long series of texts from the corpus of the leading theoretical periodicals and thick journals systematically read through and completed by a number of articles from other journals, round-tables, Politburo notes, and memoir literature forming a large representative sample of the political debates between 1985 and 1991. The sense of this perestroika’s transformation can be described in terms of the rise and fall of human agency as one of the central themes and as the self-representation of the political speech. The emerging political philosophy backing up the reforms was marked by attempts to find an appropriate intellectual language and intellectual foundations for an authoritative, principled and moving public speech. The historiosophical imagery - that of choices made by people in the crucial points of bifurcation on a bulky and branchy tree of the world history - at first provided this sought-for intellectual basis justifying public speech and placing the speaker in the central position of an agent choosing his historical path. We try to trace some of the successes and failures on this crooked path. The original search for a new modality of speech took its full meaning in the recognition of the failure of the official late Soviet ideology to provide practical guidance, theoretical coherence or moral vigour to its authorized beholders. Arguably, this major recognition of failure was made before perestroika by many Soviet officials and intellectuals in their for interieur and addressed by the official propaganda in a number of ways and in particular by the formula routinely condemning the 'gap between words and deeds'.
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SIX, Pierre-Louis. "The party nobility : Cold War and the shaping of an identity at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (1943-1991)." Doctoral thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/49328.
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Defence date: 15 December 2017Examining 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.
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Carlyle, Keith Cecil. "The impact of Gorbachev's reforms on the disintegration of the Soviet Union." Diss., 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/1025.
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This dissertation of limited scope traces the attempts by Gorbachev
(1985-1991) to reform an economic, political and social system which was in
a state of terminal decline.
The origins of its demise, it is argued, lay in the ossified command
economy inherited from Stalin. The enormous damage inflicted on Soviet
agriculture during collectivisation in the 1930s~ when millions of productive
peasants died, proved to be a fatal blow to that sector.
Tlms, Gorbachev followed a two-fold strategy ofrefonn. Glasnost
(openness) was introduced to allow constructive debate on economic and
social matters. Despite a hesitant beginning, the right to criticise allowed the
emergence of more radical campaigners, such as Yeltsin who demanded
greater democracy. Significantly, the revival of ethnic nationalist demands in
the republics led to disintegration.
Perestroika (restructuring) was intended to modernise and boost living
standards. The economy faltered but the market was not yet in placeHistory
M.A. (History)
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Wachtmann, Jenna Lee. "Democracy aid in post-communist Russia: case studies of the Ford Foundation, the C.S. Mott Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/7927.
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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.
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Poletika, Nicole Marie. ""Wake up! Sign up! Look up!" : organizing and redefining civil defense through the Ground Observer Corps, 1949-1959." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/4081.
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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)In the early 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged citizens to “Wake Up! Sign Up! Look Up!” to the Soviet atomic threat by joining the Ground Observer Corps (GOC). Established by the United States Air Force (USAF), the GOC involved civilian volunteers surveying the skies for Soviet aircraft via watchtowers, alerting the Air Force if they suspected threatening aircraft. This thesis examines the 1950s response to the longstanding problem posed by the invention of any new weapon: how to adapt defensive technology to meet the potential threat. In the case of the early Cold War period, the GOC was the USAF’s best, albeit faulty, defense option against a weapon that did not discriminate between soldiers and citizens and rendered traditional ground troops useless. After the Korean War, Air Force officials promoted the GOC for its espousal of volunteerism and individualism. Encouraged to take ownership of the program, observers appropriated the GOC for their personal and community needs, comprised of social gatherings and policing activities, thus greatly expanding the USAF’s original objectives.