This thesis examines relations between the Bolshevik regime and those scholars who were already full members of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the time of the October Revolution. By examining the post-revolutionary careers of these 'old Russian academicians,' the work seeks answers to the following questions: how did the status of members of the academy change after the revolution; what factors helped the 'old academicians' to adjust to post-revolutionary conditions; on what grounds did the academicians justify their cooperation with the Bolsheviks; . and, finally, what was the ideological basis of the regime's policy towards 'old academicians.' This work treats the subject not as an example of relations between a revolutionary regime and a pre-revolutionary institution, but focuses instead on the reaction of individual academicians to the situation in which they found themselves after October 1917. The work shows that many members of the academy were more politically active than earlier studies of the Academy of Sciences have tended to portray them. It finds that factors ranging from fields of specialization to personal character influenced the academicians' ability to adjust to the new conditions. Biographies of individual academicians show a striking continuity between their pre- and post-revolutionary behavior. In other words, the sharpest critics of the tsarist regime became the sharpest critics of the Bolsheviks, while those who had been time-servers before October 1917 also displayed more willingness to cooperate with the new regime.

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The 1943 battle to free the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk from German occupation during World War II was fought from the beach head of Malaia zemlia, held for seven months by Soviet landing troops, including the young Leonid Brezhnev. The heroes of this campaign are commemorated through an amalgam of memoir, monuments and ritual, rendered particularly paradoxical by the discrepancy between the insignificance of the campaign at the time and the importance attributed to it retrospectively. Novorossiisk appears to have been honoured as a Hero City due to myth alone, largely dependent upon Brezhnev’s political influence when leader of the Soviet Union. Using an interdisciplinary historical, cultural and sociological approach, this thesis establishes the mechanism and dynamics of the construction of the war myth in Novorossiisk under the Brezhnev government and its propagation today under the Putin régime. This research on the sociology of myth making in an authoritarian political environment adds significantly to scholarship of the war cults prevalent in the late Soviet Union and contemporary post Soviet Russia. Based on an analysis of agency, I demonstrate that, despite pervading state influence on remembrance of the war, there is still scope for the local community and even the individual in memory construction. This is a case study with wider political and social connotations, linking the individual citizens of Novorossiisk with evolving state policy since the war. Through the prism of this minor Hero City, the complexity of myth and memory is revealed, as new evidence is brought to bear on a myth that most Russians consider dead, along with Brezhnev and the Soviet Union. This work demonstrates that the myth of Malaia zemlia is still relevant as much more than just local history for citizens of Novorossiisk today, remaining an integral part of its identity seventy years after the end of the war.

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This thesis is devoted to a comparative study of the evangelical movement in the territory of the former Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1990s. The possibility to compare the two periods is due to their common historical trends of liberalization in government policy in relation to religious organizations, as well as the nature of the evangelical movement at this time. The thesis is to identify and analyse three key trends in the development of the evangelical movement inherent in both periods, such as the desire of the cultural establishment in the East Slavic society under the domination of other religious or ideological systems; the dynamic development of relations with the state; and the development of church structure and solving of church matters. In the study, the author argues that the gospel spiritual awakening in the 1920s and 1990s is directly related to the temporary decline in the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which treated religious minorities as competitors as well as the weakness of the state ideology. However, even after an active spiritual awakening the evangelical movement remained a minority and covered no more than two percent of the population. The author explores the relationship between evangelical churches and the state, which in both historical periods was undergoing transition and crisis. A significant difference which was found in the relationship for the two study periods is shown. The research investigates the particular church development and explains the reasons for the differences and similarities in the nature of church life and ministry of the evangelical movement in the 1920s and 1990s.

The subject of this thesis is the untold history of the Soviet activist commune - spontaneous urban cells of collective activism created by young enthusiasts eager to put theory into practice, engage with Soviet ideology, and act on the modern socialist visions circulating the early Soviet state. Socialism in One Apartment: Activist Communes, Ideology, and Praxis in the Early Soviet State is formed around the construction, outlook, and demise of these communes. It traces their development inside the Soviet institutes of higher eduction, their migration into wider society, and the exponential growth in commune numbers accompanying the First Five Year Plan, before assessing the gradual dissolution of this movement in the early-to-mid 1930s. It is the contention of this thesis that the activist commune provides a unique perspective for us to reassess and enhance our understanding of Soviet society, citizen-state relations, and the formation of the Soviet edifice. Utilising a range of unused and neglected archival collections and contemporary print holdings, this study shows how these young activists appropriated and effected revolution between 1917 and 1934. Challenging old coercive and recent discursive arguments, which suggest that Soviet officials maintained absolute and measured control of revolution and state, this evidence reveals the symbiotic and at times convoluted reality of the world's first communist state. The activist communes are shown to engage with, and comment on, important revolutionary themes, such as cultural revolution, the formation of the new life (novyi byt), and new socialist working habits. By exploring the activities, local contingencies, and impact of the activist communard, this thesis assesses the complex relationship between enthusiast and state; the dialogue between the autonomous and the official. It shows how communards extended the initiatives, policy, and discourse of the state, but also helped to shaped the practical realities of this revolution on the ground. The role of official state forces is not disputed, but the communard is used to highlight the significance of the active subject and to add texture to our understand of early Soviet development. This thesis, therefore, not only fills a lacuna in Soviet history but offers an innovative insiqht into the establishment of Soviet political culture - the concerns and issues that drove the political agenda of the early Soviet state.

Both the academic and the fiction element of the thesis concerns events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s. The first element informs the second. The academic portion is based on the first Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, the only such gathering allowed by Stalin in his lifetime and an event following which many of its delegates were murdered. Primary research sources include the stenographic verbatim record of the Congress itself and an addendum consisting of biographical material published by the Writers Union of the USSR in 1990 as Russian Communism tottered towards its end. This part of the thesis examines aspects of Soviet reality against the background of the Purges, and includes consideration of the writer's world, the significance of the Red Army to literary life, the position of foreigners and the doctrine of Socialist Realism, officially sanctified at the Congress. Other sources include memoir, histories of the period and material from the Thirties Soviet press. The fiction element comprises an excerpt from a novel, The Eastern Bow, which takes its title from Auden's poem A Summer Night. It is a story of espionage set in Moscow, Paris and London from 1937 to 1939. The plot involves the writing of a book in Russia by an unknown writer of genius who tells the truth about Stalin, the Purges and what the Revolution has become –a perversion of its earlier ideals. The secret police, the NKVD, hunt for the book, its author and all connected with it. This sub-plot combines with another centred in London and Paris in which a Soviet spy within MI6 is also being sought by elements within British intelligence. The two strands combine in France at the climax of the novel.

Marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovskiy, Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of Victory, Knight of the Bath, OBE, victor of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, the destruction of German Army Group Centre and East Prussia, participated in some of the most significant operations in the history of war, let alone the twentieth century. Yet, in the English speaking world Rokossovskiy is unknown, a name, vaguely associated with famous events. There is no sustained historical analysis of Rokossovskiy’s style of leadership and operational command in the English language. Rokossovskiy rejected the authoritarian leadership culture of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Zhukov’s Red Army. Rokossovskiy was highly demanding and occasionally harsh but his leadership encouraged initiative, consultation, trust, delegation and tolerated mistakes in a way that made him unusual, indeed exceptional, in the Red Army. It was primarily an authoritative style of leadership but Rokossovskiy practised different forms and styles of leadership guided by his own instinctive judgement according to the demands of the situation and the nature of his subordinates. This was a considered philosophy of leadership and command that set him apart from his contemporaries. Rokossovskiy’s style of leadership was intimately connected to his conduct of operations. As one of the Red Army’s finest commanders, respected by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, Rokossovskiy’s operational art was dominated by the idea of depth. Rokossovskiy, the Pole, was the heir to a long Russian tradition, centuries old, of deep operations, whereas Zhukov, the Russian, was committed to operational encirclement and annihilation, a Germanic concept. Marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovskiy had a distinct military style of his own: his style of leadership challenged the Red Army’s authoritarian culture whilst his style of operations endorsed the historical traditions of the Russian army. It makes him one of the most significant military commanders of the twentieth century.

This thesis examines the reasons why Stalin purged his Red Army during 1937-38 at the same time as World War was looming. This gutting of the officer corps created huge turmoil inside the Red Army and affected at the very least 35,000 army leaders, resulting in thousands of discharges, arrests and executions. Previous explanations of the military purge have typically concentrated on Stalin’s relationship with his military elite and how he supposedly believed they would become a block to his expanding power. Framed as the ‘Tukhachevskii Affair’, after its most famous victim, the military purge is most commonly depicted as merely the extension of Stalin’s advancing lust for total power into the Red Army. This thesis will show that such accounts are unsupported and inadequate and will provide a new explanation of the military purge. This thesis will show that Stalin did not attack his army elite in order to increase his power, but this was a last minute action made from a position of weakness. Taking the formation of the Red Army in early 1918 as its starting point, this thesis will argue that the key to understanding Stalin’s attack on the officer corps in 1937 is to understand how the military was perceived as susceptible to subversion. From its very formation the Red Army was seen as a target of ‘enemies’, ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and was regarded as vulnerable to infiltration. Over a period of twenty years the army faced an array of exaggerated and imaginary threats. Stalin was plagued by nagging doubts about the reliability of his forces, from mass instability in the lower ranks to supposed disloyalty in the military elite. By 1937 these perceived threats had culimated in a spy scare and it was this that finally forced Stalin to crack down on the Red Army.

Of all the Tsar’s former subjects, the Kazakh nomad made perhaps the most unlikely communist. Following the Russian Civil War and the consolidation of Soviet power, a majority of Kazakhs still practised some form of nomadic custom, including seasonal migration and animal husbandry. For the Communist Party, this population posed both conceptual and administrative challenges. Taking guidance from an ideology more commonly associated with the industrial landscapes of Western Europe than the expanse of the Kazakh Steppe, the new Soviet state sought nevertheless to understand and administer its nomadic citizens. How was nomadism conceptualised by the state? What objectives did the state set itself with regards to nomads, and how successfully were these objectives achieved? What confounded the state’s efforts? Using a range of archival documentation produced by Party and state, scholarly publications, newspapers and memoir, this thesis assesses the Soviet state’s relationship with Kazakh nomads from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the collectivisation drive. It argues that any consensus about the proper government of nomadic regions emerged slowly, and analyses the effect on nomads of disparate policies concerning land-ownership, border-control, taxation, and social policies including sanitation and education. The thesis asserts that the political factor which most often complicated the state’s treatment of nomads was the various concessions made by the Bolsheviks to non-Russian national identity. Meanwhile the state also made some concerted efforts to adapt itself to the nomadic lifestyle of the Kazakh population. The thesis concludes with a summary of the sedentarisation campaign 1928-1934, in which nomadic communities were collectivised and brutally forced to settle. But the thesis’ central focus is on the years preceding sedentarisation, which have received comparably less attention in the historiography and, the thesis argues, represent a distinctive period for the state’s treatment of Kazakh nomads.