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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Slavic Languages and Societies
Does Russia Love The Whip?, Maeve Emma Mcqueeny
Does Russia Love The Whip?, Maeve Emma Mcqueeny
Senior Projects Spring 2017
State-sponsored violence has permeated the lives of the Russian people for over a millennium. But it has been and is accepted as the price to be paid for national security to combat enemies from without and within, and to keep the country moving forward.
I will show the persuasive methods that allow totalitarian conditions to prevail in a society: from distortion of national memory to romanticize violence; coping mechanisms which breed a mentality of unawareness and denial that allow for the perpetuation of violence; and the effect of transgenerational trauma which allows violence to infect family tradition. I will show …
The Wolf Attacks: A History Of The Russo-Chechen Conflict, Christina E. Baxter
The Wolf Attacks: A History Of The Russo-Chechen Conflict, Christina E. Baxter
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chechens fought against the Russians for independence. The focus in the literature available has been on the wars and the atrocities caused by the wars. The literature then hypothesizes that the insurgency of today is just a continuation of the past. They do not focus on a major event in Chechen history: the Soviet liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1944. It is this author’s assertion that the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR forever changed the mindset of the people because it fractured a society that was once unified. This …
Civic Culture: Public Opinion And The Resurgence Of Civic Culture, Yuri Levada
Civic Culture: Public Opinion And The Resurgence Of Civic Culture, Yuri Levada
Russian Culture
There has hardly been a stretch in Russian history more saturated with sweeping changes than the period between 1988-1993. Packed into this exceedingly brief historical era are the rise of "perestroika" and the fall of its illustrious leader, Mikhail Gorbachev; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence in its place of 15 independent states; the August '91 communist putsch and the democrats' triumphant ascension to power; the proliferation of virulent ethnic conflicts and the recognition of the abiding need for cooperation; the bloody October '93 confrontation between the executive and legislative powers and the surprising strength that the …
Soviet Everyday Culture: An Oxymoron?, Svetlana Boym
Soviet Everyday Culture: An Oxymoron?, Svetlana Boym
Russian Culture
Mikhail Mishin, a Soviet satirist, wrote that Russians recognize themselves in the famous fairy-tale character Ivan the Fool. He bides his time napping on the heated furnace and gets up only to undertake major heroic feats. Ivan the Fool might be a great hero, but he has no idea how to survive his everyday life. Everyday life, captured in the Russian word byt, is a more dangerous enemy to him than the multi-headed fire-spitting dragon. The everyday is Russia 's cultural monster. The nation might worship its heroes and their fabled ability to withstand hell or high water, but …
Psychological Culture: Ambivalence And Resistance To Social Change, Alexander Etkind
Psychological Culture: Ambivalence And Resistance To Social Change, Alexander Etkind
Russian Culture
"National character," "modal personality," "collective unconscious," "ethnic mentality," "cultural identity" -- these and similar notions are designed to capture psychological traits that distinguish one social group from another. Attempts to isolate such hypothetical qualities are not different in principle from efforts to describe religious, legal, or other social patterns found among people who have lived together for a length of time, except that psychological constructs tend to focus on subjective characteristics and are somewhat harder to identify. For the first time, the link between culture and psychology came under close scrutiny in the nineteen century. German linguists Steinthal and Lazarus …
Intellectual Culture: The End Of Russian Intelligentsia, Dmitri N. Shalin
Intellectual Culture: The End Of Russian Intelligentsia, Dmitri N. Shalin
Russian Culture
No group cheered louder for Soviet reform, had a bigger stake in perestroika, and suffered more in its aftermath than did the Russian intelligentsia. Today, nearly a decade after Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled his plan to reform Soviet society, the mood among Russian intellectuals is decidedly gloomy. "The intelligentsia has carried perestroika on its shoulders," laments Ury Shchekochikhin, "so why does it feel so forlorn, superfluous, forgotten"? G. Ivanitsky warns that the intellectual strata "has become so thin that in three or four years the current genocide against the intelligentsia would surely wipe it out." Andrey Bitov, one of the country's …
Moral Culture: Public Morality And Private Responsibility, Igor Kon
Moral Culture: Public Morality And Private Responsibility, Igor Kon
Russian Culture
When Mikhail Gorbachev unfurled his reform banners in the late 1980's, many observers inside and outside Russia hailed perestroika as a moral renaissance. The Soviet Union was indeed a spiritually bankrupt society at the time, its citizens demanding a clean break with the past and yearning for a better future. Despite the new openness or glasnost, the changes have been slow in coming and often very controversial. A public opinion survey conducted in February 1991 showed the country morally adrift and deeply divided about the course of reforms.