Ethnic violence broke out in the Soviet Union during the second half of Mikhail Gorbachev's time as Soviet leader. In general, Soviet leaders were taken by surprise by the upsurge in nationalism in the USSR. They came to believe that Communism had supplanted nationalism in the Soviet Union, but they were proven wrong. It is the thesis of this project that territoriality is the underlying factor behind the ethnic conflicts that broke out in the last years of the USSR and the first years of the post-Soviet era. It is a psychological program in the human mind that defines what are the "proper" boundaries of a polity. Since territoriality is a constant, there exist six identifiable facilitating factors that condition how territoriality leads to ethnic violence. These facilitating conditions are the size of an ethnicity (majority/minority status), economic resource differences, the availability of information, the presence of an ethnic diaspora nearby, the location of a polity, and the role of the elites. To address the issues surrounding the territorial basis of ethnic conflict, an exploratory, heuristic, most-similar systems comparative case study approach is employed. This project's temporal domain is 1988 to the present, and the polities selected for examination are Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova, and Chechnya. In addition, two non-events are chosen for study: Tatarstan and Crimea. In the non-events, ethnic violence did not break out on a sustained and prolonged scale. Territoriality was present in all of the examined cases except for the second Chechen war (1999-), which mutated from an ethnic conflict into a religious struggle on the Chechen rebel side. The facilitating factors are present in some form in the five cases.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Advisers: Roger D. Simon; John Pettegrew.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3879. Adviser: Aaron B. Beaver.

Is there a direct correlation between the degree of an artist’s participation in ideologically defined discursive practices and the aesthetic value and expressive innovation of her or his work? How does the concept of the implied audience influence an author’s approach to the creative process? How relevant is the author’s own self-projection in her or his works to their aesthetic quality? Examining these and other questions, this dissertation studies the strategies of an artist’s engagement with or disengagement from repressive political systems which are understood here as mechanisms of putting forward demands regarding the artist’s creative output. Questions of late Socialist Realism and its national variants, ideological art, kitsch, mass literature, narodnytstvo (populism), “chimerical” (“whimsical”) prose, totalitarian culture, shistdesiatnytstvo (movement of the generation of the 1960s), and cultural heritage define the theoretical framework of the dissertation. The study discusses the period of the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union, focusing on Ukrainian literature and its dynamics during the Stagnation Era and perestroika. Examples from Russian literature test the argument and provide opportunities for comparative analysis. Within Ukrainian literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the dissertation examines the prose works of Valerii Shevchuk and Volodymyr Drozd and poetry of Petro Midianka and Oleh Lysheha. Within Russian literature, the study discusses Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s prose works and Elena Shvarts’s poetry. The authors and their works illustrate the range of possible attitudes towards participation in the system of Soviet cultural production. Close readings of the authors’ representative works demonstrate how complex negotiations with the system are reflected in the aesthetic quality and expressive ability of literary works. The dissertation shows the significance of the author’s concept of the implied audience and her or his own self-projection as an author for the creative process and its outcome. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation argues for the importance of knowledge production for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on intelligence-gathering, including espionage, as a genre of intellectual work situated in state institutions, oriented toward pragmatic goals, and produced by and for an audience of largely anonymous bureaucrats. It relies on archival sources from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome, as well as published materials. The dissertation begins by investigating how seventeenth-century Siberians compiled information about China, and how maps and documents were transmitted first to Moscow and then to Western Europe to be republished for wider audiences. It then examines the post-Petrine shift to more specialized forms of intelligence-gathering, focusing on industrial espionage in the Moscow-Beijing trade caravan. As the dissertation shows, the changing priorities of the Russian intelligence gathering apparatus shaped and often crippled the ability of Russian Qing experts to address wider audiences. On the mid-eighteenth-century Russo-Qing border, the dissertation follows the building of a robust Russian intelligence network in Qing Mongolia amid unprecedented inter-imperial tension, and its ultimate failure to achieve desired geopolitical ends. These intelligence failures are then shown to provide a compelling new explanation for the collapse of European imperial attempts at diplomacy in East Asia in the last third of the eighteenth century. Finally, the dissertation concludes by showing how, by means of strategic forgetting, intelligence was reconstructed into academic sinology during the reign of Alexander I. / History

This paper considers the efforts of the Russian government to counter the growth of China’s soft power in the Russian Far East in the context of the dramatic rise in trade between the two nations in the 15 years of the “Putin Era,” from 2000 to 2015. The Amur (or “Black Dragon”) River watershed forms the core of the Russian Far East, Russia’s last territorial acquisition from the former Chinese empire and the key to Moscow’s efforts to connect with the burgeoning Asia-Pacific economies. This study investigates which federal- and provincial-level policies the Russian government has implemented to counter the growth of Beijing’s influence in the Russian Far East, and analyzes the effectiveness of these policies in the area’s three most populous sub-regions: Amur Oblast, Khabarovsk Krai, and Primorsky Krai. Though initially hypothesizing that the Russian government had no coordinated strategy to counter China’s soft power in the region, this study concluded that policymakers in both the Kremlin and the Russian Far East have successfully discouraged a large-scale Chinese demographic or economic footprint along the Russian side of the Amur. However, Moscow’s failure to both encourage sufficient ethnic Russian immigration to the Far East and to effectively stimulate local economies in need of Chinese labor and investment has paradoxically strengthened Beijing’s regional soft power. Russia’s citizens in the Far East increasingly look south across the Black Dragon River towards China for a brighter future.

<p>This study is a comparative historical analysis of the link between environmental activism and state-society relations in 20th century Russia and Mexico. It explores the three main currents of environmentalism that originated in these two countries under non-democratic political systems that originated in the social revolutions of 1910 (Mexico) and 1917 (Russia) and the roles that each current has played in the process of democratization that began in the 1980s. It is based on critical evaluation and synthesis of the following theoretical fields: collective action, social movements, political regime change and democratic transition. Scholarly literature and press sources are used to corroborate and evaluate findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with environmental activists, researchers, lawyers, and journalists as well as data from participant observation conducted by the author in Russia and in Mexico. The main findings of the study are two-fold. 1) Environmental activism affects social rather than political democratization. 2) The type of environmental activism that has the most significant impact on social democratization is social environmentalism - the current that emphasizes the synergy between the struggles for social justice and civil rights on the one hand and against environmental degradation on the other.</p> / Dissertation

In this dissertation, I develop and apply an original voice-leading method to the music of Shostakovich. Between the years of 1926 and 1948, his music involved extreme chromaticism that required analytical views from both Russia and the West. In the mid-twentieth century, Russian theorists such as Lev Mazel' and Alexandr Dolzhansky wrote about the modal language of Shostakovich's works, but their writings lacked how to identify them within extremely chromatic passages. In the West, scholars describe his music as both tonal and atonal, sometimes combined within one work. I unify these two views with my voice-leading system consisting of an intervallic resolution of the doubly augmented prime (DAP), which appears seemingly random on the musical surface, but occurs for specific compositional reasons. First mentioned by name in Aleksei Ogolevets' 1946 "An Introduction into Contemporary Musical Thought," the DAP served no harmonic or modal purpose. While Ogolevets mentions and includes examples that show this interval, he does not discuss its resolutions nor how it functions in musical contexts. This structure, however, has broader conceptual and analytical implications. Therefore, I develop a method based on the voice leading and semitonal resolutions of the DAP, which I apply to the music of Shostakovich. The DAP contributes to his compositional style by functioning in three ways: 1) identifying one mode or two simultaneous modes, 2) completing traditional triadic harmonies, and 3) facilitating both tonal and modal modulations.

No description available.

En 1917, les Bolcheviks prennent le pouvoir en Russie, répudient la dette extérieure, nationalisent les entreprises privées et imposent un début de gestion soviétique à l’économie. La France, dont les liens économiques avec la Russie ont été largement renforcés durant les trois décennies d’avant-guerre, voit ses immenses avoirs dans l’ancien Empire compromis. Les milieux privés français, qui sont les plus lésés parmi ceux des puissances alliées, réagissent fortement à ce changement de régime. Ce mémoire s’intéresse à ces milieux d’affaires et cherche à comprendre comment ils réagissent à la prise de pouvoir soviétique. Jouent-ils un rôle dans l’évolution du processus décisionnel vers l’intervention militaire? Ont-ils un impact sur le terrain en Russie? Comment subissent-ils l’échec final des efforts français? Nous démontrons que le facteur économique est central dans l’adoption d’une politique interventionniste. Nous étudions également comment le gouvernement cherche à soutenir les milieux privés discrètement, mais les utilise surtout pour avancer ses propres intérêts en Russie. Enfin, nous démontrons que l’échec des milieux privés à protéger leurs intérêts a de nombreuses causes communes avec l’échec de l’intervention militaire. / In 1917, the Bolshevik party seized power in Russia, repudiated state debt, nationalized private enterprises and imposed early forms of Soviet management to the economy. France, whose economic ties with Russia had largely grown during the three previous decades, saw her huge investments in the country compromised. The French private sector, by far the most affected of all Allied powers, reacted strongly to this regime change. This memoir focuses on the subsequent actions of the private sector, and seeks to understand how they reacted to the Bolshevik’s coming to power. Did they play a role in the process of decision-making towards military intervention? Did they have any impact on the ground in Russia? How did they react to the ultimate failure of the intervention and the loss of their assets? We demonstrate that the economic factor was central in the adoption of an interventionist policy. We also examine how the French government discreetly tried to support the private sector, but mostly used it to advance its own interests in Russia. Finally, we demonstrate that the failure of the private sector to defend its interests has many common causes with the failure of the military intervention itself.