Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Shining Lights In A Crooked Generation: The Experiences And Impact Of Soviet Evangelical Youth, Abigail Coker

Masters Theses

Despite facing severe pressure from their secular surroundings, Soviet evangelical youth displayed resilience and creativity throughout the Soviet era, becoming key figures in the preservation and growth of the Russian Baptist church. Up until now, western scholars have largely ignored this story or treated it peripherally. This research seeks to address this gap by examining the experiences and impact of Soviet evangelical youth. Throughout the Soviet period, the content of the evangelical youth experience remained essentially unchanged, focusing on fellowship, service, and Bible teaching through preaching, singing, and poetry readings. The period from 1908 – 1929 became a foundational one …

Vasily Grossman And Ilya Ehrenburg: Soviet Jews On The Nazis And Soviets, Joshua Heisel

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg were both significantly influential writers in the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Grossman and Ehrenburg were both Jewish war correspondents and witnessed Nazi war crimes. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trial used The Hell of Treblinka, written by Grossman, as evidence. Following the war, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union began to implement increasingly anti-Semitic policies. Jewish citizens faced discrimination, the Soviet state opposed “dividing the dead” of World War II, and it culminated in the Jewish Doctors Plot in 1953. Both writers covered extensively the Holocaust and how to treat Germany after …

For The Father Of A Newborn: Soviet Obstetrics And The Mobilization Of Men As Medical Allies, Amy E. Randall

History

This article introduces the translated pamphlet For the Father of a Newborn by contextualizing it in Soviet medical eff orts to deploy men as allies in safeguarding reproduction and bolstering procreation in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the pamphlet as an illustration of how doctors and other health personnel tried to educate men to protect their wives’ pregnancy and the health of their wives and newborns in the postpartum period, and it considers the implications of these initiatives for women’s bodies, gender norms, sexual practices, models of masculinity, and the socialist goal of promoting women’s equality.

Retelling Mecca: Shifting Narratives Of Sacred Spaces In Volga-Ural Muslim Hajj Accounts, 1699–1945, Danielle Ross

History Faculty Publications

This article examines how Volga-Ural Muslims narrated their encounters with the sacred spaces visited during the hajj. It examines nine accounts hajj composed from the 1690s to the 1940s, to consider how changes in international politics, Russia’s domestic politics, and the culture of Islamic learning within the Volga-Ural Muslim community led to writers to revise narratives of why the sacred spaces of Mecca were sacred, how best to experience the power of these sacred spaces, and how these sacred spaces fit into the local culture of Volga-Ural Islam under Russian and Soviet rule.

From The Volga To The Mississippi: African Americans And The Soviet Experiment, Daniel Candee

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This thesis investigates the role of African American Communists in the struggle for Black liberation during the interwar period. Making a vital intervention into the field, this work attempts to debunk the harmful Cold-War stereotype of African American Communists as “puppets of Moscow” while simultaneously engaging critically with the relationship between Black liberation and international Communism. Drawing on a vast array of secondary and archival sources, this work charts a course between a vision of the Comintern as an avenging anti-colonial angel, and a cynical force disinterested in Black Liberation.

Tracing the developing relationship between Black intellectuals and the Comintern …

Quiet River, Heavy Waters: Un-Silencing Narratives Of Social-Environmental Inequalities In The Cradle Of Soviet Plutonium, Rosibel Roman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In December 1948, the Soviet Union’s first plutonium production facility, Mayak Production Association (PO Mayak), began operation in the Southern Urals region of Russia, at the western edges of Siberia, near the restricted city of Chelyabinsk-40, known in the present day as Ozyorsk. Since then, rural communities located downstream from PO Mayak have experienced health, economic, ecological and social impacts of contamination from high-level radioactive wastes released by the facility into the Techa River and its surrounding ecosystem. My research, drawing from archival research conducted in Russia and the United States, as well as secondary sources in English and Russian, …

The Russian Gulag: Understanding The Dangers Of Marxism Combined With Totalitarianism, Mark C. Riley

Senior Honors Theses

This study examines the Soviet Gulag, the main prison camp administration implemented in the Soviet Union. The GULAG represents an institution that is not well known, and this paper will explain why it existed and why it remains in the shadows of history. Terror, propaganda, and belief in progress represent the three ideas that directed the Soviet totalitarian system. This thesis will accordingly explore the ideology behind totalitarian government and Marxist practice in order to understand why the Gulag was allowed to exist. Finally, it investigates the reasons why the Gulag has not taken a priority position in human knowledge …

The Advent Of Neo-Revisionism?, Günter Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Five distinguished scholars offer separate commentaries on the article by Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. All of the commentators reject the broad interpretation and many of the specific arguments put forth by Cox and Kennedy-Pipe. They point out several crucial issues that are omitted from the article and raise questions about the authors’ sources, use of evidence, and selective invocation of secondary literature. They regret that Cox and Kennedy-Pipe seem to dwell on a large number of the same matters that preoccupied radical revisionist historians in the 1960s. They argue that although Cox and Kennedy-Pipe offer a more sophisticated version …