The objective of this thesis is to examine the nature of federal bargaining in post-Soviet Russia by comparing Moscow&rsquo / s negotiations with Russia&rsquo / s two oil-rich republics in the Middle Volga: Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. In particular, the thesis attempts to explain how Bashkortostan was able to gain autonomy from Moscow that is very close to the level of autonomy enjoyed by Tatarstan, despite the fact that Bashkortostan is clearly in a disadvantageous position when compared to Tatarstan and the Bashkorts form only the third largest ethnic group in the Republic after the Russians and the Tatars. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that sometimes the relatively disadvantageous party in federal bargaining might be given more autonomy not because of its bargaining power, but because of the general bargaining strategy of the federal center. Therefore this thesis is an attempt to understand how Moscow, fearing that Tatarstan might emerge as the hegemonic power in the Middle Volga, sought to strengthen the position of Bashkortostan against Tatarstan, and how the success of the Bashkort political elite to manipulate the weaknesses of Moscow in the post-Soviet arena provided Bashkortostan with more or less same degree of autonomy compared to that of Tatarstan&rsquo / s.

This thesis analyzes the role of Ukrainian mythological discourses in the formulation of Ukrainian national identity. The main purpose of the present thesis is to explore the interaction between mythological discourses, which are defined as sets of popular beliefs, presuppositions and the patterns of self-identification rooted in the consciousness of ethnic collectivities, and the process of national identity formation in post-Soviet Ukraine. The main focus of the thesis is on the ways of the use of Ukrainian mythological discourses by post-Soviet Ukraine&rsquo / s political and intellectual elite preoccupied with the task of implementing their nation-building project in Ukraine. This thesis consists of six chapters. Following the introductory first chapter, the second chapter explores the concept of &ldquo / myth&rdquo / in nationalism studies. The third, fourth and fifth chapters discuss the nation-building process of post-Soviet Ukraine by examining cultural, political and social aspects. The concluding chapter discusses the main findings of the thesis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 350-356).

The image of 'the Jew' in nineteenth-century Russian literary texts is traditionally viewed as a paradigm of anti-Semitic discourse. Critics have typically accentuated the presence and continuity of negative stereotypes of the Jews. Yet anti-Semitic discourse is not the only approach to the representation of the Jews in Russian literature. This study explores the manifold nature of the portrayal of 'the Jew' in the works of three Russian writers of the highest calibre: Gogol, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. Literature at the time was highly politicized and a writer was expected to examine the issues of the day from an ideological stance. This meant that a writer's fictional representation of 'the Jew' was treated by many as an illustration of Jews' qualities in real life. After the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century, Russia acquired a large Jewish population. These new Jewish subjects were confined to the Pale of Settlement, which restricted their rights of residence in Russia proper. That in itself meant that the majority of Jews were invisible to Russian society. Writers mainly used Western literary patterns in describing 'the Jew'. Nevertheless, in using traditional mythic stereotypes of the Jews they not only applied the familiar framework of Western authors but also created images based on specifically Russian culture. Moreover, at different periods of the century 'the Jew' was endowed with traits uncharacteristic of previous myths. The writers' constructions of 'the Jew' thus became complex and flexible. In order to investigate the complex constructions of 'the Jew' the following matters are discussed: (1) the depiction of 'the Jew' by these three writers in conjunction with their understanding of their own identity, events occurring during their lifetime, and stereotypical frames of reference for the Jews; (2) the degree of controversy in their representations; (3) their use of the image of 'the Jew' to define the essential qualities of the Russian.

The focus of my research is Soviet documentary filmmaker, Elizaveta Svilova (1900-75), most commonly remembered, if at all, as the wife and collaborator of acclaimed Soviet film pioneer, Dziga Vertov (1896-1954). Having worked with her husband for many years, Svilova continued her career as an independent director-editor after Vertov fell out of favour with the Central Committee. Employed at the Central Studio for Documentary Film, a state-initiated studio, Svilova’s films were vehicles of rhetoric, mobilised to inform, educate and persuade the masses. She draws on visual symbols familiar to audiences and organises them according to the semiotic theories – namely techniques of dialecticism and linkage – attributed to the Soviet montage school of the 1920s. On-screen credits indicate that, during the period 1939 to 1956, Svilova was the director-editor of over 100 documentaries and newsreel episodes, yet this corpus of films has received very little critical attention. As my thesis aims to demonstrate, the reasons for the lack of attention to Svilova’s films are partly due to her husband’s eminent status – the rules whereby we construct film history have resulted in Svilova’s contribution being absorbed into Vertov’s – and this is related to the long-standing tendency within film criticism to marginalise the female artist. My thesis also touches on issues regarding curatorial and archival policies, and provides an opportunity to rethink early film history and the modes through which historiographic and filmographic knowledge are transmitted.

This thesis attempts to account for post-Soviet Russian national identity and nationalism ‘from below’, employing the ‘thick descriptions’ of the nation reproduced by ordinary Russians across social and generational lines. It examines the current equilibrium in mainstream nationalist hegemonic discourse, shedding light on the vitality of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. In doing this, nationalism is viewed as a set of discursive formations that make claims about how or what the nation is or should be. A central aim in this research is to highlight what discursive constructions are shared or contested across a representative sample of the Russian population. In order to offer a meaningful assessment of nationalist discourse, this research employs ethnographic fieldwork driven by a grounded theory approach. With fifteen months of fieldwork in three Russian cities, this permitted room for exploration and siginificant redirection of the research focus. This helped reveal the interconnections between certain common, foundational elements of national identity and the structure of a dominant nationalist discourse. Previous research has often focused on the challenges of Russian nation-building given the complicated heritage bestowed by the Romanov and Soviet empires. This thesis identifies certain historical and cultural factors vital to the shaping of Russian national identity today. It also identifies a current hegemonic nationalist discourse and unpacks how it is relevant to the majority. This dominant discourse is built on certain myths and versions of normality, much of which takes the late Soviet as ‘normal’ and the wild nineties as ‘abnormal’. The thesis also explores how the above is contested. What is argued is that, at the current moment, the challenge of anti-hegemonic nationalist discourses is, for many people, neutralised by the appeal of a particular geopolitical vision. This research outlines how visions of the nation are weaved into commonly shared notions of identity and underlines how the current status quo is held together.

This thesis examines the social history of female urban prostitution in the final years of the Russian empire (1900-1917). During this period, the tsarist authorities legally tolerated prostitution under a system named regulation (reglemantatsiia) or the medical-police supervision of prostitution (vrachebno-politseiskii nadzor za prostitutsiei). The stated aim of regulation was to reduce levels of venereal disease, yet in practice the system functioned rather to control the movement and settlement of prostitutes by making them known to the authorities. This thesis focuses on the different groups that the rules of regulation directly affected, including prostitutes, their clients, their managers, and wider urban communities. It examines specific urban spaces, the state-licensed brothel, and the lives of registered prostitutes and their clients. This approach allows an exploration of how the system operated in practice and how the regulation of prostitution fitted within wider attempts by the imperial state to monitor lower-class people. In doing so, this thesis contributes to the growing literature on sexuality, on the intersections of gender and class, and on the experiences of lower-class people in late imperial Russia. To illuminate the diversity of both state practice and social experience, this thesis draws on a wide range of correspondence from ‘above’ and ‘below’, including letters between central and provincial government institutions and petitions written by lower-class people to those in authority. This research moves away from focusing solely on the capital of St Petersburg to examine how the regulation of prostitution functioned at a local level, drawing on archival material from Arkhangel’sk, Riga, and Tartu. It argues that responses to the regulation system were rooted in the specific social, environmental and economic circumstances of a particular place and strongly influenced by the socio-economic transformations of the final decades of tsarist rule. In light of this, the thesis maps official and unofficial reactions to regulation onto the shifting social and economic landscape of modernising Russia. It explores how early twentieth-century urbanisation, industrialisation and transportation developments posed further challenges to the ambitions of the tsarist authorities to ‘know’ and monitor all the women who sold sex.

The thesis proposes a comparative textual research on Hungarian and Romanian cinema by setting up a model that informs the implicit cinematic reflection on socialism in film. By establishing two aesthetic categories – horizontal and vertical enclosure –, the thesis argues that the spatial structure of the narratives reveals and alludes to the oppressive policy of the Hungarian and Romanian socialist regimes. The first part of the research scrutinises the space in Romanian cinema, and investigates the birth of the vertical enclosure. The analysis focuses on the spatial representation of Bucharest, that is the claustrophobic illustration of the urban landscape and its space depicted by the tools of notorious surveillance on screen. As argued in the thesis, the architectural forms and their film representations build up a spatial constellation identical to Bentham’s Panopticon discussed by Michel Foucault. The second part of the investigation concentrates on Hungarian cinema and the evolution of horizontal enclosure in film. Through textual analysis of the selected films that are set on the Great Hungarian Plain, the thesis discusses the allegorical use of space during and after socialism. Therefore, while concentrating on the circularity of the location and the mise-en-scène of the films – that refer to the isolation and indefiniteness of space – the author argues that the directors recall the parabolic language of the cinematic corpus of the socialist epoch. As concluded by the work, the contemporary art cinema of Romania and Hungary both reference socialism by using space as the main device for the implicit textual reflections. In this way, horizontal and vertical enclosure also emphasise the revival of the forms of the socialist aesthetics.

No description available.

In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). By 1985 relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba had been in existence for over 25 years and were extremely close in both ideological and trade terms. Soon after coming to power, Gorbachev implemented the policies of perestroika and glasnost while Fidel Castro introduced the campaign for rectification of errors in Cuba. There were great differences in these campaigns since the Cuban one was much more ideologically driven than its Soviet counterparts. This study is an examination of the period from March 1985 to the end of 1991. This is done in three broad areas: official Soviet policy towards Cuba; the unofficial Soviet policy towards Cuba (an examination of academics and social/political commentators work on Cuba) and the Cuban perception and reaction to the events in the Soviet Union. This study also attempts to establish whether a rethinking, with the benefit of hindsight, has taken place in the years since 1991. In 1985 official and unofficial Soviet policy towards Cuba were identical but as the Gorbachev period continued this began to change. Official policy began to become contradictory in style since Moscow started "veiled" attacks against aspects of its relationship with Cuba while at the same time still defended the island in the face of continuing US hostility. Moscow also stated that the differences in Soviet and Cuban policies were because each campaign was designed for conditions specific to each country but that both had the same goal: the improvement of socialism. Although official policy became more outspoken, at no point during the Gorbachev era did it call for the termination of relations with Cuba. Unofficial Soviet policy started to change as the effects of glasnost permeated Soviet society. This became noticeable from 1987 onwards and reached the point that an open debate on the relationship was taking place. By 1991 unofficial policy was vastly different from the official Soviet line towards Cuba. The Cuban government also stated that the programmes were for situations specific to each country but that both had the same goal, that being the improvement of socialism. The unofficial Cuban line mirrored the official one but by 1990 this started to change as it started to criticise Soviet policies. In 1991 the Cuban government also started to do this. Due to the difficult situation in the socialist world the Cuban government from 1989 had been trying to increase its hard currency markets. A general re-thinking with the benefit of hindsight has not taken place on either side but an examination of participants' memoirs is still a valuable study to conduct. Although it offers very little new evidence for this period it does, however, give more credence to the events that took place between March 1985 and December 1991.