Digital Commons Network^™

Glasnost, Perestroika And Big Mac's: The Significance Of Mcdonald's In The Changing Face Of The Ussr, Theresa Bartholomew

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

Early on the morning of 30 January 1990, George Cohon, president of McDonald'sCanada, left his hotel room and drove to Pushkin Square in Moscow. Nervous about the international press that would be covering the opening of the first McDonald's in this nation and anxious to make the opening perfect, he arrived to see the streets empty in front of the fast-food restaurant except for a lone policeman. Wondering where the anticipated crowds of Muscovites were, Cohon approached the officer, concerned by the apparent lack of interest in the first McDonald's opening in the Soviet Union. After a short conversation with …

The Time Of Troubles Causation, Class Warfare, And Conflicting Interpretations, Jeffrey S. Hardy

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

The end of a dynasty in medieval or early modern Europe was often followed by a calamitous period of conspiracy and revolt, intrigue and bloodshed. Such was the case in Russia from 1598 to 1613, the period later called the Time of Troubles. Few epochs still weigh on the collective conscience of the Russian people as does the Time of Troubles. Fears associated with this period remain to this day, as evidenced by the frequent references to it after the fall of the Soviet regime. But the Time of Troubles has not always been well understood. The chroniclers and revisionists …

Early Russian-Chinese Relations, Dean William Bennett

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

In February. 1654, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov dispatched a friendly, if rather pompous, letter on its way across the vast steppes of Siberia and Mongolia to the emperor of China, Shun-chih. In this letter he lamented that the rulers of the two realms had never before established any official contact between themselves, and he expressed a fond hope that the tsar and the emperor might live thenceforth "in friendship, love, and communication." The prospects should have been alluring, promising trade and wealth for both states, and also frequent exchanges of embassies. But less than three years later, the leader of …

Apotheosis Of The State And The Decline Of Civilization: A Systems Approach, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

Humanity is undergoing a second Axial Age. The first, as described by Karl Jaspers, brought transcendence into the vision and self-understanding of humans and the world. The rise of secularism and “Death of God” is dissolving and fragmenting that transcendence — a vital subsystem of the civilization system. Economy, knowledge and government comprise three additional subsystems and have coalesced to form the modern sovereign state, diminishing the traditional place of religion, art and philosophy in civilizations. An example of a state lacking common institutions of transcendence was the Mongol empire. Ruling Russia for a quarter millennium, its state form was …

Edvard Benes And His Policy To Expel Czechoslovakian Germans, Travis Mueller

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

At the end of World War II, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Czechoslovak Republic expelled fifteen million Germans from their homelands in Eastern and Central Europe. During the eviction to the occupied zones of Germany, two million Germans perished.1 Often brutally mistreated, these Germans suffered the wrath of a great European backlash against the Nazis. Nowhere was the expulsion more brutal than in the Czechoslovak Republic. The two nations' shared border and intertwined history made the expulsion of over three million Germans mainly from the Sudetenland-particularly severe.

Minority Language Education In Russia: An Example Of Social And Cultural Reproduction And Correspondence Theories, Nadezhda Braun

Russian Language Journal

Russia is an incredibly diverse country, both linguistically and ethnically. However, Russia is often presented, and presents itself, as a monolith. Russia’s approach to minority language teaching further perpetuates this monolithic view by creating a hierarchical language structure with Russian at the top. This hierarchy is created through societal pressure, language requirements in the Russian education system, and the minimization of minority language instruction, in direct contrast to best practices for language instruction. Chuvash in Chuvashia and Nenets, Khanty, and Selkup in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug serve as examples of this linguistic hierarchy. This paper uses social and cultural reproduction …

The Soul Of Russia And The Soul Of Ukraine, David Wilkinson

Comparative Civilizations Review

This essay addresses the issue of two contemporary state identities — that of Russia and that of Ukraine.

"Russian Overseas Flagship" И Языковая Ситуация В Казахстане, Элеонора Д. Сулейменова

Russian Language Journal

The image of Kazakhstan as a multilingual country is associated with the metonymic identification of its constituent ethnic groups and 117 local languages. The dynamics of the linguistic situation (1970-2019) indicate a strong tendency towards linguistic homogeneity. Ethnic groups at demographic risk, divorced from their historic homelands, are immersed in a rapid shift towards the Russian language. The demonstrated vitality of the languages of individual ethnic groups is related to the specifics of their respective proficiencies in Kazakh and Russian. Evidence of the emergence of a regional variant of the Russian language is cited and carefully reviewed, but found to …

Russian Heritage Language Speakers In The U.S.: A Profile, Olga Kagan

Russian Language Journal

Brecht and Ingold (2002) advocate systematic efforts to develop heritage language (HL) pedagogy to remedy U.S. language deficits: “…because of [heritage language learners’(HLLs’)] existing language and cultural knowledge, they may require substantially less instructional time than other learners to develop these skills. This is especially true for speakers of the less commonly taught languages” (p. 1).

Russian is one of those less commonly taught languages in the U.S. that is critically important for national security and the global economy. Since the early 1970s, when a large wave of Russian-speaking immigrants began to settle in the U.S., American universities have had …

Piloting A Dynamic Assessment Model: Russian Nominal Morphology As A Building Block For L2 Listening Development, Rimma Ableeva, Olga Thomason

Russian Language Journal

Second language (L2) Russian research identifies listening comprehension as the least developed language ability among university students and points to the importance of listening instruction in Russian programs (e.g., Rifkin 2005; Comer 2012a; Isurin 2013). For example, Rifkin (2005, 11) states that students typically exhibit an “intermediate-low level of L2 listening proficiency” after completion of a 4-year Russian program. According to Isurin (2013, 39), the survey conducted among L2 Russian learners and instructors acknowledged “listening comprehension as the most problematic area in students’ language proficiency in general.” Comer (2012a) attributes poor listening ability to insufficient teaching materials and activities as …

Lexical Profile Of L2 Russian Textbooks, Ekaterina Talalakina, Tony Brown, Mikhail Kamrotov

Russian Language Journal

Traditionally, the link between vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension has been examined through the prism of lexical thresholds and vocabulary coverage (Milton 2009). Lexical thresholds represent the most frequent words in a language (i.e., lemmas, or dictionary forms of a word) and usually come in increments of 1,000. In relation to the Russian National Corpus, knowledge of the 1,000 most frequent lemmas allows for comprehension of 60% of a text’s vocabulary, 2,000 lemmas – 69%, and 10,000 – 85% (Lyashevskaya and Sharoff 2009, v). These figures support an earlier estimation by Brown (1996, 2), who claimed (without elaborating on what …

Review: Russian Science Fiction Literature And Cinema: A Critical Reader, Alla A. Smyslova, Alexandra Portice

Russian Language Journal

Anindita Banerjee’s critical reader provides excellent insight into the development of science fiction literature and cinema in Russia from the early nineteenth century all the way to the mid-2000s. The book features four sections, each of them comprising four articles by different authors, and an introduction from the editor. The latter provides a brief but brilliant overview of Russian nauchnaia fantastika, or “scientific fantasy,” positioning it within the context of literary, social, and scientific life in the USSR, as well as outlining the existing scholarship on the topic. From the very beginning, when the genre first emerged at the turn …

Cultural Differences In Russian And American Magazine Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach, Emily Furner

Russian Language Journal

Though some may think that TRANSLATION and LOCALIZATION are two words that represent the same function, many scholars make a distinction between the two terms, and some even add a third term, GLOBALIZATION, into the mix. Translator and localization specialist Bert Esselink (1998) perhaps best defined the distinctions in these terms: Globalization […] is typically used in a sales and marketing context, i.e., it is the process by which a company breaks free of the home markets to pursue business opportunities wherever their customers may be located. Translation is the process of converting written or displayed text or spoken words …

Bass World 3: Music In St. Petersburg, Christian Hales, Eric Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Russia has always been known for its indelible contributions to the arts. The likes of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rostropovich and Koussevitzky cultivated their great talents there. Eric Hansen, professor of double bass at Brigham Young University, encouraged me to use some of his connections in Russia as an opportunity to experience this rich arts culture. His friend, Artem Chirkov, is principal Bassist of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and winner of the Bradetitch International Bass Competition. Eric suggested that I make the trip to St. Petersburg to participate in Artem’s World Bass Festival because it would help to prepare me for my …

Review Essay: Popularizing Russian Language, Michael S. Gorham

Russian Language Journal

In an era rife with complaints over the degradation of language in the face of a host of commonly cited bugaboos (inferior schools, lazy pupils, declining morals, insidious new media technologies), one can only be heartened by the fact that language and language usage continue to be a source of popular discussion and debate. Even in American culture, where reverence for the national tongue has historically paled compared to the likes of France and Russia, one can find regular language-related rubrics in both print and broadcast media (e.g. “Word on the Street” and “Week in Words” [Wall St. Journal], “On …

Великий И Могучий Олбанский Язык: The Russian Internet And The Russian Language*, Daniela S. Hristova

Russian Language Journal

The worldwide proliferation of the Internet as a fundamentally new media technology has coincided with a radical social and linguistic liberalization in Russia. This junction changed drastically the interrelationship between the standard language and the non‐standard language varieties. A paradigmatic manifestation of the new Russian linguistic reality is the prevalent Internet trend of alternate spellings and non‐normative lexical use. The phenomenon is frequently referred to as an “Olbanian” language and associated with the counter‐culture of the so‐called “padonki.” Disregarding the fundamental principles of Russian orthography, spelling, and even morphology, the padonki have created an idiom that seemingly allows complete freedom …

Birth Language Attrition And Reacquisition In Russian Adoptees, Avram J. Lyon

Russian Language Journal

The wave of adoption from Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union has brought a large number of incomplete Russian speakers into the United States; over 71,000 orphans from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus have been issued United States entry visas since 1992 (U.S. Department of State 2007 and 2009; Ruggiero 2007). This is part of a larger trend toward international adoption, amounting to several hundred thousand children in the past decades. Children adopted by American families experience a radical reduction in birth language exposure and must quickly acclimate to and become proficient in the language of the …

Писатели О Языке: Contemporary Russian Writers On The Language Question, Ingunn Lunde

Russian Language Journal

Post-perestroika Russian society exhibits a pronounced concern with the language question. Linguistic issues are discussed at all levels of society, and a great many people engage in these debates: politicians, philologists, teachers, journalists, writers, students, bloggers, and others. Newspapers and journals feature columns or article series devoted to language; conferences discuss “the state of the Russian language”; the state sponsors a large number of radio and television programmes on language and language culture; various centres and institutions offer programmes promoting linguistic cultivation; there are information services on linguistic questions on the Internet; many blogs deal with the language question.

Introduction To Volume 58

Russian Language Journal

It was the Russian linguist, Grigorii Vinokur, who first introduced the term “kul’tura iazyka” or “language culture” to Russian in his writings on the changes taking place in the Russian language in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution (Kul’tura iazyka [Moscow 1929]). Loosely defined as language production at all ranges of the discursive spectrum, the term provided Vinokur with a useful heuristic for writing about language in flux in a manner that took into account not just the high-end linguistic production of belles-lettres, but also the everyday language use (and abuse) of more mundane, but equally influential sources – including …

On The Satirical Counter-Discourse Of Processed Cheese, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke

Russian Language Journal

The post-Soviet period presents an illuminating picture of competition taking place between different public discourses for meaning construction and articulation. It has been observed that after an initial period when the public narrative of the nation experienced fragmentation, and, using Pierre Bourdieu’s term, went through a period of heterodoxy during the last decade―roughly corresponding with the presidency of Vladimir Putin―it has displayed the growing characteristics of orthodoxy, with its centrally produced “common sense” meanings and assumptions.

Introduction To Volume 57

Russian Language Journal

Volume 57 of Russian Language Journal presents a distinguished set of U.S. and international research studies and reports reflecting the three major directions of RLJ: two significant contributions in the area of the description of contemporary standard Russian; two new works in the area of Russian language policy (one a corpus study, the other a status report); four new empirical studies on the acquisition of Russian as a foreign language by adult English-speaking learners; and two valuable studies ― one American, one Russian ― on recent changes affecting Russian in the foreign language classroom environment.

Introduction To Volume 56

Russian Language Journal

In his recent study of the linkage between corpus and status planning in language policy formation, Joshua Fishman observes that “languages are increasingly viewed as scarce national resources (not unlike flora and fauna, agricultural or environmental resources, and all other such improvable or alterable resources whose quality can be influenced by planned human intervention).” Given the particular history of language policy development in Russia and the former Soviet states in the 20th century, the appearance in mid-2005 of the new Law on the State Language of the Russian Federation is an event of considerable potential impact on the study and …

Russian As The National Language: An Overview Of Language Planning In The Russian Federation, Joan F. Chevalier

Russian Language Journal

In June of 2005 the federal legislation On the national language was signed into law by Vladimir Putin.1 The bill, revised and renamed several times after its initial introduction in the Duma in 2001, proved to be highly controversial, stimulating lively public debate. The law merits discussion as the first major piece of federation legislation focused on language policy and language planning to appear in the Russian Federation in several years. The law addresses both language‐status planning, which concerns the status and function of the Russian language, and language corpus planning, which attempts to affect changes in language forms and …

“The State Turning To Language”: Power And Identity In Russian Language Policy Today, Lara Ryazanova‐Clarke

Russian Language Journal

The first years of the twenty‐first century in Russia saw a considerable rise in the state’s regulation of language. In the words of one of the agents of this regulation, Natalia Liashchenko, a Consultant for the Committee for the Nationalities, “Определенный поворот к проблемам русского языка произошел и в органах государственной власти России.” The engagement of the state by way of regulations in the national discussion of the nature and quality of the Russian language demonstrates ‘the state power turning to language’.

Globalization, Internationalization, And Language Learning In Russia, Liudmila Verbitskaya

Russian Language Journal

In reviewing international trends over the last few decades, two words— globalization and internationalization—inevitably come to mind. Thinkers around the world are pondering these processes, which are rooted in the technological and social changes of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The notions of globalization and internationalization are obviously related, but exactly what do they mean? In The Globalization of Higher Education, Peter Scott (1998a) concludes that not only are the words not synonyms, but the processes they denote are radically different and even dialectically opposed.

Russia's Other "Mormons": Their Origins And Relationship To The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, Eric A. Eliason, Gary Browning

BYU Studies Quarterly

When Mormon missionaries entered Russia in 1990, they were astonished to hear about "Mormon" settlements already existing in the Samara region. Other evidence of Mormonism appeared: for example, locals used the term "Mormon crosses" to describe a unique style of crucifixes in cemeteries. In this article, the authors delve into the questions of whether or not sects with ties to mainstream Mormonism existed in pre-perestroika Russia or if unrelated groups earned the nickname "Mormon" for living in unusual family arrangements, similar to polygamy. Using data gathered from Latter-day Saint missionaries who served in Russia in the late 1990s as a …

A Gathering Place: Russian Week At The Stockholm Sweden Temple, John C. Thomas

BYU Studies Quarterly

Temples are the great gathering places of Mormonism. As such, they cater in varying degrees to the diversity of an increasingly global Church membership. From its inception, the Stockholm Sweden Temple was designed to transcend the linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic differences that might otherwise undermine the temple's higher purposes. Dedicated in 1985, that temple was therefore well suited to play a vital role in the early development of the Church in Russia and the Baltic states. During the 1990s, many Saints from the post-Soviet states traveled together for a week's stay at the Stockholm temple to be "endowed with power …

Vignettes Of Temple-Bound Russians, Thomas F. Rogers

BYU Studies Quarterly

Excerpts from a recently published personal journal give glimpses of the souls who found their way to the "Russian Weeks" in the Stockholm Sweden Temple.

Russia And The Restored Gospel Gary Browning, Kahlile Mehr

BYU Studies Quarterly

Gary Browning. Russia and the Restored Gospel. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997. xxii, 377 pp. Index, chronology. $11.99.

Out Of Obscurity: The Emergence Of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints In “That Vast Empire” Of Russia, Gary L. Browning

BYU Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.