Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

"Kill The State In Yourself": Totalitarianism And The Illiberal Dissidence Of Egor Letov, Katherine Frevert

Honors Papers

The Siberian punk movement of the 1980s is often regarded as the Soviet Union’s most aesthetically and politically iconoclastic rock underground. Amidst the numerous bands the scene produced, none has matched the notoriety of Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Civil Defense) and its leader Egor Letov. At first glance, Letov’s songs declaring hatred for the “totalitarian” Soviet Union and its destruction of the individual evoke associations with the previous generation of Soviet dissidents, who used the term “totalitarianism” to contrast the Soviet system with the Western democracy they admired. Yet Letov, who rejected democratic reforms and after the collapse of the USSR proclaimed …

Don Quixote In Russia In The 1920s-1930s: The Problem Of Perception And Interpretation, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the early twentieth century and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, which will be the third in a sequence of five, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from being skeptical to complete admiration and even glorification of the hero. Don Quixote was increasingly compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “. . . начав юмористический …

Stalinist Cosmopolitanism, Steven S. Lee

Criticism

Review of Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 by Katerina Clark. Cambridge, MA: harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 432. $38.50 cloth.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: The Poetics Of Violence In Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry, Benjamin Julius Dranoff

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Resilient Russian Women In The 1920s & 1930s, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

The stories of Russian educated women, peasants, prisoners, workers, wives, and mothers of the 1920s and 1930s show how work, marriage, family, religion, and even patriotism helped sustain them during harsh times.

The Russian Revolution launched an economic and social upheaval that released peasant women from the control of traditional extended families. It promised urban women equality and created opportunities for employment and higher education. Yet, the revolution did little to eliminate Russian patriarchal culture, which continued to undermine women’s social, sexual, economic, and political conditions. Divorce and abortion became more widespread, but birth control remained limited, and sexual liberation …

Express Yourself: Investigating Wartime Deportations In The Context Of Changing Soviet National Policy, Beryl Emily Taylor

Senior Projects Spring 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Looking Back At Brezhnev, Peter Rutland, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock

Peter Rutland

Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian And American Cold War Satire, Derek C. Maus

Books

Unvarnishing Reality draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek C. Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations—including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov.

Maus surveys the background of each nation's culture, language, sociology, politics, and philosophy to map the foundation on which cold war satire was built. By …

Introduction: Continuity And Change In Russian Culture, Dmitri N. Shalin

Russian Culture

This project on Russian culture goes back to the Spring of 1990 when several American and Russian scholars converged at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University and decided to join forces in a study of changes sweeping the Soviet Union. From the start, the participants agreed that they would not try to chase fast breaking news from Russia -- a hopeless task given the pace of recent changes, but rather would focus on the continuity and change in Russian culture, on the long-term social forces that compel the Russian people to reexamine old ways and reevaluate old values.

Labor Culture: Labor Morality Under Socialism, Vladimir Magun

Russian Culture

Soviet leaders had always taken a keen interest in workers' behavior and labor motives and sought to keep labor morality under strict state control. A complex network of values and regulations was developed for this purpose after the October Revolution of 1917. They were best articulated in the "political economy of socialism" which purported to present a scientific picture of the country's economic life. Textbooks on socialist economy were widely circulated in the Soviet Union and appropriate courses included into a core curriculum for all higher education institutions in the country. Basic tenets of socialist political economy were taught in …

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 …

Historical Culture: Russia In Search Of Itself, Boris Paramonov

Russian Culture

Russia's 75 year-long experiment with communism is over, but the question persists as to whether the Soviet regime was a historical aberration or an expression of the country's destiny. This question is as old as the Bolshevik revolution. It has produced a voluminous literature and will no doubt continue to attract attention in the near future. Alas, it can not be answered conclusively, for it is grounded in the questioner's ideological a priori and tells us more about the historian's biases than about Russian history.

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

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

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 …

The Intelligentsia Without Revolution: The Culture Of The Silver Age, Andrei Ariev

Russian Culture

The most effective definition of "the intelligentsia" might read: “Russian intellectuals who are generally opposed to the government.” But even Russia’s traditionally powerful government has collapsed at times, leaving a vacuum of authority. This was precisely the historical situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. It made an indelible impression both upon thinkers, such as Rozanov, and on politicians, such as Lenin.

Russian Architecture Between Anorexia And Bulimia, Vladimir Paperny

Russian Culture

The Russian visual sensibilities (if there is such thing) are formed by two contrasting influences. On the one hand, there is a natural attraction to decorative surfaces, to richness of colors and shapes. Historians tell us that in the 10 th century Prince Vladimir decided to convert to Christianity mainly because of the visual experience his emissaries had had in Constantinople: “The Greeks led us to the building where they worship their God,” they wrote to the Prince, “and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such …

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.

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology As Emancipatory Discourse In The Late Soviet Union, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In the following analysis, we will find that Soviet sociobiology did not develop incrementally out of daring interdisciplinary probes; rather, it seemed to spring forth fully formulated in the comprehensive Novyi mir article. Moreover, already in 1971, several years before Wilson's book established its controversial eponymous discipline in the United States, the biosocial paradigm was framed by its earliest Soviet proponents as a scientific vindication for diversity, pluralism, individual difference, heterogeneity, human rights, and ultimately, individual responsibility for one's own actions. In short, the same scientific discipline that in the west was associated with racism, reductionism, and social determinism developed …

The Struggle To Create Soviet Opera, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s.

Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the …

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 …

We (1924), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

One of the first and most important works of modern dystopian literature, this novel by Russian writer Evgeny Zamayatin was written in 1919-1920 and published in English in 1924. The original Russian version was not authorized for publication in the Soviet Union until 1988, when Gorbachev's policy of culture openness (glasnost) allowed readers access to twentieth-century Russian literature inimical to the communist project.

Miyamoto Yuriko And The Soviet Propaganda, George T. Sipos

George T. Sipos

No abstract provided.

A Future For Socialism In The Ussr?, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This paper was written before the Fall, and when the fate of the former Soviet Union and Marxism in it was still in question. At the time many people interested in Soviet politics had high expectations for Gorbachev's reform program, with some expectation that it would rescue "actually existing socialism" from its crisis. The paper took a more pessimistic view, correctly identifying, in retrospect, the factors that lead to the internal loss of faith in socialism in the Soviet ruling elite, the basic nature and trajectory of perestroika and itys centrifugal effects on the USSR itself., and the ultimate rise …