This thesis examines propaganda and educational campaigns in the Brezhnev-era USSR, where the Party-state continued the longstanding Soviet attempt to form the country's youth into conscientious builders and defenders of communism. Focusing on the military, military-historical and physical-cultural activity that the state identified as areas of strategic importance in a period of intensifying competition with the capitalist world, the thesis analyses the interactions between propaganda and its producers, and the ordinary and extraordinary young people at whom it was aimed. It finds that state agencies and organisations of the Brezhnev era followed tradition in employing heroic motifs and discourses to elicit heroic behaviour amongst the population, often seeking to apply themes and material from earlier periods directly to the situation of late-1960s and 1970s youth. In particular, propaganda emphasised the importance of both models of wartime heroism, and the characteristics articulated in the 1961 Moral Code of the Builder of Communism - but in a political and social environment now much changed from those in which they had originally emerged. The thesis begins with a study of material surrounding the reinstatement of universal conscription after Khrushchev's army reforms, before examining youth involvement in one of the flagship military-patriotic education campaigns of the period. The second part of the thesis then shifts the focus to a more symbolic, yet no less significant site of the 'defence of the honour of the Motherland': the international sporting arena, particularly during the 1972 Olympiads in 'hostile' West Germany and Japan. Through a case study of coverage of the gymnast Olga Korbut, the thesis argues that, while propaganda-makers still sought to control the Soviet definition of 'heroism', conditions increasingly allowed for the emergence of celebrity and a popular heroism based more on self-advancement and public acclaim than on established Soviet ethical models.

The diploma thesis named "Nixon-Brezhnev Summits in 1973 and 1974 in Czechoslovakian Press" deals with the presentation of summits between Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon in contemporary Czechoslovakian dailies. It analyzes texts published by the media concerning the meetings in 1973 and 1974 in Washington and Moscow in the set period of more than one month around the meetings. Not only does the thesis research the degree of bias of the media content due to the ideological inclination towards the Soviet Union. It also analyzes the way in which the media in Czechoslovakia dealt with the presentation of both the enemy superpowers as partners. The theory part provides in introduction of the topic and basic historical context of the events. Furthermore it characterizes the respective meetings and the analyzed dailies. The practical part covers detailed qualitative content analysis of the selected representatives of the contemporary Czechoslovakian press, namely Rudé právo, Svobodné slovo, Mladá fronta and Lidová demokracie. Then the thesis compares the presentation of the respective summits and attempts to find the causes of the differences and trends in the in the presentation. As an addition the thesis also provides a comparison with similar meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,...

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The main aim of this diploma work is to present the main topics of the soviet geopolitical thinking. The main thesis are presented at the beggining of the work and were influenced mainly by personality of Joseph Stalin. At the end of the first chapter those main goals of the soviet geopolitics are evaluated as well as the role of Stalin for the USSR. The timeline of this diploma work streches from 1953 - 1982 and the main events of this period are mentioned. At the end the role of the three soviet leaders is summarized and their actions evaluated.

The subject of this thesis is a genre analysis of Soviet film comedies of the late 60s and the 70s that is based on the reception and production history data. The aim of this research is to grasp this type of comedy as a specific political and socially-cultural phenomenon of the Eastern bloc and its relation to Soviet popular culture. A methodology of the genre analysis will derive from Rick Altman's semantic-syntactic approach, which will allow us to describe the chosen genre group as a complex genre trend set in the unique social, cultural, economic and in this particular case also ideological context, to follow the development and fluidity of the genre trend, as well as to find and to compare mutual attributes of the chosen films. The analysis will not be based solely on the group of the most watched films, but also on the production data focusing mostly on the films' budget, as well as dramaturgic supervision and censorship. Another part of the diploma thesis will be based on the gathered reception data such as contemporary media response and viewer ratings, focusing on the important role that Soviet film comedies played in the period and partially continue to play in the present-day Russian popular culture. Fusion of all analytic parts shall bring us to the basic definition of the Soviet film...

This thesis focuses on the developments in the Soviet top-elite dynamics from 1981 to 1991. It claims that a careful examination of particular characteristics of the Soviet nomenklatura as a form of top-elite can give us important hints on how the intra-nomenklatura tensions that had been accumulating since its inception aggravated in the last decade of the USSR and contributed substantially to the Union&rsquo / s drive to the end. Hence, the main argument of this thesis is that when the Soviet top-elite lost its confidence on the elite-preserving capacity of Gorbachev, it started searching for alternatives, one of the most notable of which was the market economy option advocated by Boris Yeltsin at that time. This shift in the preferences of the Soviet nomenklatura played a considerable role in the dissolution process.

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Bibliographic record: Michal MACHÁČEK: Gustáv Husák. A Political Biography with Special Emphasis on Czech-Slovak Relations in 20th Century, PhD. thesis, The Faculty of Arts at Charles University 2017, 476pp. [784 standard pages]. Abstract The dissertation thesis discusses public activities, thoughts and the political life of JUDr. Gustáv Husák, CSc. (1913-1991), who was involved in the Czech-Slovak public space for sixty years with a significant footprint even today. The text is based on a thorough research and is chronologically structured, intertwined with thematic areas, however an analytical approach prevails. The first chapter focuses on Husák's youth, the factors that led him to the communist movement, and his early activism. This is followed by a portrayal of the Husák's activities during the Second World War, his role in the resistance, participation in a propaganda trip to the Nazi conquered Ukraine, and his vision of Slovakia as a republic of the Soviet Union. His later involvement in the Slovak National Uprising provided the legitimacy of his later political career in the post-war era, when he successfully led the struggle for the communist monopoly of political power in Czechoslovakia and attempts to present the Communist Party of Slovakia as a national party. Next two chapters show the origins...