<p> The text presented here is a study of the editing and appropriation techniques of three constructivist films and their affect on narrative: Artavazd Peleshian's <i>Our Century,</i> Johan Grimonprez's <i>dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y</i> and Adam Curtis' <i>It Felt Like a Kiss.</i> An analysis of these techniques is done through the lens of the Russian Formalists, Victor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin and their respective concepts of defamiliarization and familiarization. Attention is paid to formal analysis in relation to historical context.</p>

<p> While Joseph Stalin is commonly reviled in the West as a murderous tyrant who committed egregious human rights abuses against millions of his own people, in Russia he is often positively viewed as the symbol of Soviet-era stability and state power. How can there be such a disparity in perspectives? Utilizing an ethnographic approach, extensive interview data, and critical discourse analysis, this study concludes that the political elite in Russia are able to control and manipulate historical discourse about the Stalinist period in order to create a version of the past that bolsters their own political preferences. Appropriating the Stalinist discourse, they minimize or ignore outright crimes of the Soviet period, and instead focus on positive aspects of Stalin's rule, such as leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War. Advancing concepts of 'preventive' and 'comprehensive' co-optation, this study analyzes how the political elite in Russia inhibit the emergence of groups that provide alternate narratives or narratives that contradict the elite-driven discourse, while promoting message-friendly groups that bolster elite preferences. Bringing the resources of the state to bear, the Russian elite are able to co-opt multiple avenues of discourse formulation and dissemination. Elite-sponsored discourse positions Stalin as a symbol of a strong, centralized state that was capable of many achievements, enabling favorable portrayals of Stalin as part of a tradition of harsh rulers in Russian history, along the lines of Peter the Great. Implicitly, this strong state discourse is used to legitimize the return of authoritarianism that Russia has experienced. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 23, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4469. Adviser: Ben Eklof.

If capitalist cities are dense, hierarchical, and exploitative, how might socialist space be differently organized to maximize productivity, equitability, and collectivity? That question—central to early Soviet planning specialists—is the basis of this dissertation, which investigates the origins and evolution of the socialist spatial project from land nationalization to the end of the first Five-Year Plan (1917-1932). This dissertation asserts that socialist urban practices and forms emerged not by ideological edict from above, but through on-the-ground experimentation by practitioners in collaboration with local administrators—by praxis, by doing. Existing scholarship on early Soviet architecture and planning relies on paper projects of the Moscow avant-garde—radical, exciting, and yet largely unbuilt. This dissertation, based on new empirical research, uncovers the untold origins of socialist urban practice through the brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects that defined Soviet urban praxis in the 1920s and 30s. Through interweaved stories of three so-called “socialist settlements” in Baku, (Azerbaijan), Magnitogorsk (Russia), and Kharkiv (Ukraine) this study explores how Soviet physical planners and their clients addressed unprecedented socioeconomic requirements. Provisions like affordable housing near the workplace, robust municipal transportation and evenly distributed social services emerged from these experiments to affect far-flung sites in the Soviet sphere for decades to follow. Material gathered from now accessible archives—including architectural briefs, bureaucratic memos, drawings and photographs—finally permits deep inquiry into these significant years and projects. It draws the Soviet case into dialogue with scholarship on industry, urbanization, and social modernization in Europe and the United States, and highlights the contributions of Soviet designers to devise viable alternatives to the capitalist city. / Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

My thesis is about one of the most distinctive cities in the Russian Federation - Kazan. In my thesis I focus on the changes that were unfolding in the landscape and structure of Kazan in the post-Soviet period (1991-2000s). The collapse of the Soviet Union produced an immense paradigm shift as combined revival of nationalism and religion swept over Tatar people who in turn have been actively changing the city. In this work I researched how the Tatar religious and national revival affected the landscape and structure of Kazan. I used data such as landmarks, memorials, establishments, institutions and other symbolic, religious or national elements of the city in order to demonstrate the scope of the Tatar urban revival. Additionally, I tried to understand the actual causes and processes that contributed to the revival. Tatar revitalization of Kazan is a complex social phenomenon which reveals many important political and global processes. / Urban Studies

This dissertation analyzes the ideology and activities of the Black Hundred movement at the end of the Imperial period in Russia (1905-1917). It seeks to explain the reasons for the sudden, rapid expansion of Black Hundred organizations in 1905, as well as the causes of their decline, which began just two years after their appearance. It further attempts to elucidate the complex relationship between the Black Hundred and Russian authorities, including the central government and local officials. The problem is approached by offering two distinct perspectives on the Black Hundred. First, a broad overview of the movement is presented. The focus here is on the headquarter branches of Black Hundred organizations in St. Petersburg, but these chapters also look at the activities of many different provincial branches, relating trends in the provinces to events in the center in order to draw conclusions about the nature of the overall movement. Second, this dissertation offers an extended case study of the Black Hundred in the city of Odessa, where a particularly large and violent Black Hundred movement emerged in 1906. It explores the factors that made Odessa conducive to the Black Hundred, and explains events in Odessa as symptomatic of the overall condition of Black Hundred groups. The research is based primarily on material from archives in Moscow and Odessa comprising police reports and resolutions approved at national monarchist congresses. It also draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts from the liberal, leftist, and Black Hundred press, and the secondary literature. The framework primarily consists of analyzing the membership, leadership, ideology, funding, and activities of the Black Hundred organizations that served as the main expression of the monarchist movement. This dissertation concludes that the decline of the Black Hundred cannot be attributed to the harmful actions of government officials, as historians have previously argued. Instead, the movement lost public confidence and fell victim to bitter infighting owing to the corruption of Black Hundred leaders, both in the center and in the provinces. Because Black Hundred organizations enjoyed the backing of many state officials and the outspoken support of the tsar, they were often perceived as officially-sponsored parties. This attracted many unscrupulous members who hoped to use their links to the Black Hundred to cultivate official connections or to identify money-making opportunities. These members, often rising to leadership positions, proved particularly prone to corruption, a habit that ruined the organizations' finances, sparked bitter internecine rivalries, and ultimately discredited the entire movement. / Dissertation

<p> The purpose of this study is to identify necessary and sufficient conditions in regime collapse that are shared cross-regionally by the Color Revolutions of the post-Soviet region and the Arab Spring uprisings of the Arab region by utilizing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA or QCA). Two countries that experienced regime collapse were chosen from each region, Georgia and Ukraine as well as Egypt and Tunisia, and were compared with two countries from each region where the regime did not collapse even when faced with mass anti-regime protests, Armenia and Belarus as well as Algeria and Syria, for a total of eight case studies. This research presents conditions derived from popular theories on regime collapse, reviews the pre-revolutionary conditions of the case study countries, and applies QCA methodology to tests the necessity and sufficiency of conditions within countries where the authoritarian regime in power collapsed. Results of this analysis suggest that division among coercive forces, a political crisis that weakened the regime, and the high presence of a mobilized youth movement were necessary in regime collapse in both the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring uprisings. Additionally, division among coercive forces combined with a political crisis that weakened the regime, high levels of unrestricted NGO presence, or a highly unpopular ruling elite present as causal combinations sufficient for regime collapse. Finally, Western intervention and influence presents as a possible stand alone sufficient condition, though further research is needed to identify the specific types of Western intervention and influence that are most effective.</p>

In the eighteenth century, European rulers pursued a common policy of enlightened centralism, which assaulted the rights of self-governing corporations in the name of material, social, and economic progress. For the towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, enlightened centralism began under King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764--1796) and continued uninterrupted through the partitions of Poland into the mid-nineteenth century. Employing the petitions, financial records, and demographic data of a select group of towns from Poland and Ukraine, this study investigates the consequences of enlightened centralization for the political and economic lives of burghers, Jews, and other town dwellers in Poland-Lithuania and some of its successor states: the Russian Empire (after 1795), Austrian West Galicia (1795--1809), the Duchy of Warsaw (1806--1815), and the Congress Kingdom of Poland (after 1815). A particular emphasis is placed on the fate of so-called private towns, which possessed royal charters and rights of self-government but belonged to individuals. When divorced from the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization and population growth, enlightened centralization in the towns of Poland-Lithuania did not produce the economic growth, administrative efficiency or social improvements that served to justify the abrogation of self-government in the minds of Enlightenment writers and many modern historians. Instead, centralizing policies weakened the political rights of townsmen, imposed enormous administrative costs, and substituted an ineffective and legalistic system for local control. Private towns fared the worst under centralization because state control undermined the ability and incentive of owners to offer attractive conditions to townsmen, and these unusual entities experienced an absolute decline in population and wealth after 1795.