ABSTRACT This thesis examines how Russian political elites and intellectuals have approached the issues of Russian nation and diaspora since 1991. This thesis observes that while Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin claim to advocate a civic definition of a nation in the boundaries of Russia / they extend the definition of Russian nation to cover the &lsquo / Russian diaspora&rsquo / as well. This thesis argues that the inclusion of the term Russian diaspora in Russian discourse of nationalism has paved the way for developing a consensus about Russia&rsquo / s new identity among its political elites and intellectuals. Accordingly, Russia which is defined as a homeland of ethnic Russians identifies itself as the protector of the rights of Russians in ex-Soviet republics. Moreover, this diasporic politics has been used to legitimate the Russian engagement in the internal and external affairs of post-Soviet states. Nevertheless, as this thesis demonstrates, ethnic Russians residing in the post-Soviet states have significant diversity in terms of their political orientations towards Russia. There are five parts in this thesis. After the introduction, the first chapter explains the role of Russian diaspora in the politics of Russian nationalism under Yeltsin and Putin. While the second chapter examines intellectual approaches to the issues of Russian national identity and diaspora, the third chapter focuses on the conditions of ethnic Russians in the post-Soviet states. The final part is the conclusion.

This thesis aims to examine internal and external parameters influencing Russian energy policy between 2000 and 2012. In this respect first energy policy of the Soviet Union and Russian Federation in 1990&rsquo / s are evaluated. In this framework it is assumed that old experiences and structures have influence on 2000&rsquo / s Russian Energy Policy. Russian energy profile is accepted not only a strength of Russia but also a source of limitation in Russian energy policy, it influences domestic and foreign energy policies of the country. Following the energy profile of Russia domestic energy policy of Russia is analyzed. In this respect, elite level perception on energy and use of hydrocarbon rents are important points taken into account. In addition to that, major Russian energy companies are analyzed, because they do not cross border drawn by Russian Administration. About Russian foreign energy policy, important actions and patterns about use of energy rent are evaluated / key countries for Russian energy resources are analyzed. In this respect, it is regarded that contrary to views of some scholars who consider Russian energy policy as the by product of Russian foreign policy, this thesis argues that Russian energy policy has been determined by the characteristics of Russian energy structure and domestic politics in addition to Russian foreign policy priorities. As a result issues like Russian economy, domestic developments in Russia, Russian foreign policy and international developments like emergence of new suppliers and markets, have influence on Russian energy policy and because of harmonization of energy and foreign policy, Russian energy policy carries realist features.

This thesis examines the crisis of the Russian family through the eyes of the key Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century: Tolstoy (1828-1910), Dostoevsky (1821-1881), and Chekhov (1860-1904). The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that the works of these authors are not just novels or short stories about the crisis of the family, but representative of the societal situation in Russia at the time. The aim of this study is also to show the continuity in ideas between these authors in the context of family life and marriage and to explore what kind of solutions they envisioned for the future of the Russian family. Although there has been extensive research on the family in the works of these great classics of 19th century Russian literature, there has been less analysis of the crisis of the Russian family and the solutions they offered as a way out of the crisis. Hence the aim of this research is to fill this critical gap. The first chapter focuses on the representation of family life in Dostoevsky’s latest works The Brothers Karamazov (1881), “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877), and The Diary of a Writer (1876-7). The second chapter examines Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and The Power of Darkness (1886). Tolstoy focuses his attention on both upper classes and the peasant family. Chapter three analyses the crisis of the family in some of Chekhov’s short stories and novellas that are particularly concerned with extra marital relations and marriages gone badly; they also address mistreatment of children. This thesis argues that, on the one hand, these authors depict different types of marriages and family relations, and, on the other hand, their works reflect the changing realities and attitudes regarding love and sexuality of their time. It also argues that, through their fiction and sometimes in a subversive way, these authors influenced the readers’ mentality and came up with new radical ideas about the future of the Russian family. Finally, this thesis aims to bring more academic interest to an overlooked research area, to explore how family values change through the eyes of these authors, and to contribute to a broader understanding of the crisis and the future of the Russian family through the lenses of the key Russian writers of 19th century Russia.

This dissertation concentrates on the history of frontiers, borderlands, and empires in Eastern and Central Europe in the eighteenth century. While the existing literature examines mainly ideological and political competitions among the empires for land, resources, and the stateless population; I explore more physical and material spheres of rivalry such as border security, economy and public health. This dissertation explores the politics of the Russian Empire in these spheres in the eighteenth century. It argues that the policies of improvement in migration control, border infrastructure, and health care promoted by the government of Catherine II allowed the empire to incorporate its borderland with Poland-Lithuania and attract the local population more swiftly and effectively than did political repressions, ideological propaganda, or forced cultural assimilation. / History

The dissertation examines the interrelationship between professional and public discourses on Jewish health and the politics of citizenship in Russia across the revolutionary divides of the early twentieth century. In Russia, like in other countries of the time, medical consensus held that Jews exhibited different rates of various diseases compared to Gentiles, such as a higher incidence of diabetes and a lower rate of syphilis. The validity of such data aside, the production and interpretation of these statistics reveal how the criteria of civil enfranchisement and group identity changed over the period in question. Debates about Jewish health at the time addressed two major themes: whether Jews could be full-fledged citizens and whether they constituted a particular ethnic/"racial" group. However, as the dissertation argues, it was concepts of citizenship that generated racial discourse and nationalist ideologies, in this case, and not the other way around. Two concepts of race coexisted in Russian professional and public discourses during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one historical-cultural and the other biological. This dissertation demonstrates that the former was much more politically and intellectually productive than the latter. Biological concepts of race had limited currency at the time and, as a rule, were subordinated to the discourse of ethnicity. At the same time, notions of civilization and the autonomous personality were crucial for debates about Jewish health, Jewish civil status, and the politics of formal and informal citizenship in Russia before 1917. After the Bolshevik revolution, these concepts continued to affect the state's social policies, even though they became divorced from the formal criteria of citizenship. Since the Russian empire and, in a different manner, the early Bolshevik state did not have universal and uniform citizenship based on the idea of natural rights, this study offers useful comparative material for the history of citizenship in general, and the politics of citizenship in empires and composite states in particular. It also offers a contextual, underdeterministic interpretation of the political significance of "race" which departs from established teleological and deterministic narratives of the history of racial thought. / History

The following paper is an opportunity for me to introduce Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov and his pedagogical ideas to English-speaking educators. His life's accomplishments seem even more remarkable when considering the fact that he was born into a family of serfs and later became a professor at the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. Among his students were well-known Russian artists such as Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Surikov, Victor Vasnetcov, and Vasily Polenov. In this paper, I present you with a brief analytical summary of his methodology on teaching drawing and painting, his pedagogical approaches, as well as his ideas on the development of art education in the public school setting. Chistyakov's pedagogical system still seems relevant today and, with slight adjustments, can be adapted to various teaching situations depending on the educational environment and students' abilities.

This thesis examines the role nineteenth-century women's literary journals, specifically Ladies' Journal (1823--1833), played in the development of Russian literature. The longest-lived and most-circulated of the pre-Soviet women's literary journals, Ladies' Journal was well-positioned to have contributed to the on-going formation of a national literature through its influence on the Russian woman writer and reader. Ladies' Journal served as a forum for new Russian women writers and translators. It also promoted the discussion of women's issues. However, Ladies' Journal had a contradictory editorial policy concerning women and literature. While advocating women stake their own ground as writers, Ladies' Journal modeled the type of writer it wanted. The ideal writer was the inspiration of male poets and did not differ from the Romantic heroine or the ideal Romantic woman. This was a gesture in the spirit of the time, but it had consequences for Russian literature and for the poetics and politics of Russian women's journals to come.

The present thesis analyzes the cultural image of the Russian neo-Romantic writer Alexander Grin (1880-1932) as it has been constructed by Soviet ideology and received in Soviet popular culture since the late 1950s. The topic of the thesis is unique, and it has not yet been investigated before. The thesis explores three major aspects of Grin's representation in Soviet culture: critical, fictional and cinematic. The first part "Critical representation of Grin's works in the USSR" focuses upon the process of construction and development of ideological "myths about Grin" in the system of Soviet culture. It demonstrates and analyzes the transformation of the official and public attitude to Grin's works from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second part is entitled "Representation of Grin's image in Soviet fiction: Grin as a fictional character". Through the coherent analysis of three Soviet novels (introducing Alexander Grin as a protagonist), it explores the phenomenon of the transformation of both the personal and socio-cultural attitudes to Grin. The fictional works are viewed in chronological order: The Black Sea by Konstantin Paustovsky (Chernoe more, 1935), The Wizard from Gel'-Giu by Leonid Borisov (Volshebnik iz Gel'-Giu, 1944) and The Lord of Chances by Valentin Zorin (Povelitel' sluchaynostey, 1977-79). The third part concentrates entirely on the Cinematic representation of Grin's works on the Soviet screen, analyzing five major film-versions of Grin's works: Scarlet Sails (Alye parusa, dir. Ptushko, 1961), She Who Runs the Waves (Begushchaya po volnam, dir. Lubimov, 1967), Shining World (Blistayushchiy mir, dir. Mansurov, 1984), The Golden Chain (Zolotaya Tsep , dir. Muratov, 1986), Mister Designer (Gospodin oformitel', dir. Teptsov, 1986). The study of Grin's case offers a unique opportunity to investigate how the old ideological myths are occupying the minds of younger generations nowadays. Grin is still a "cult figure" for Russian society, but it remains to be investigated to what extent his contemporary image (and the image of his fiction) is influenced by the old models of the Soviet era.

In the contemporary art-historical vision, Mikhail Larionov is renowned as the author and the main figure in the polemical discourse of Neoprimitivism and the inventor of the Rayonism style. These aspects, although crucial to his career, are far from exhausting the artist’s legacy. During his most industrious period, from 1910 to 1915, he was equally, if not more, engaged in the development of new forms of art than in the practice of painting; in fact, the conventional cornerstone of the high art in the era of Modernism – a painting – lost its central position and receded to the status of the peripheral phenomenon in his artistic practice. When considering his position as a central figure in the events of the 1910-1915 in Russia, Larionov’s ambivalence as an artist implies hesitation about the picture of gestalt homogeneity of Modernist discourse (with a painting as the hierarchical apex of high art in the Modernist era) in Russia of the early decades of the twentieth century. While historical evaluation privileges the painting over the non-painting practice of the artist, there is sufficient evidence testifying to the need to consider them as equal and synergetic.

There is remarkably little research on the history of the Russian literary ballad or on its principal practitioner, V.A. Zhukovsky. This thesis is an attempt to rectify the situation: it follows the development of the ballad genre in Russian literature from its emergence in the 179Os to its demise in the 1840s. It has been decided to concentrate on the style of the ballads as the most original feature of the Russian genre, and in particular on the epithets in Zhukovsky's ballads as his most important contribution to the development of Russian poetic style. Consequently there will be no discussion of metrics, and only occasional remarks on syntax. Chapter I treats the relationship of the Russian literary ballad to the traditional folk genre, to the "ballad revival" in late eighteenth-century European literature, and to late eighteenth- century "pre-romantic" developments in Russian literature. The traditional folk ballad is defined in terms of its narrative unit, method, and attitude, and in terms of its intangible "world" or "code". Attempts by Russian collectors and critics to characterise the popular genre are also considered. Two examples of Russian folk ballads are analysed in order to demonstrate the constant features of the genre. The literary ballad is defined in terms of these same features, and its aesthetic principles are shown to be completely antithetical to those of the traditional genre. The impetus for the emergence of the Russian literary ballad was provided not by a desire to imitate the traditional genre, but rather by the Western European ballad revival. The English revival is traced froa the change in attitudes towards the folk genre as expressed by Sidney and Addison, to Prior's early literary imitation, to Percy's collection of texts, and finally to the literary ballads of Scott and Southey. Other authors which had some influence on the Russian movement (Thompson, Young, Gray, Macpherson's Ossian) are considered briefly. The German revival is similarly surveyed: Bürger's Lenore, Herder's pronouncements on folklore, and the literary ballads of Goethe, Schiller, and Uhland. The chapter concludes with a section on Russian "pre- romanticism", including anthologies of Russian superstitions, traditions, and skazki. as well as collections and imitations of folk songs and related genres - all of which influenced the development of the ballad. Chapter II, after a brief bibliography of the Russian literary ballad, examines several ballads published anonymously during the 1790s, including two written by Anna Turchaninova , and then analyses the literary ballads of M.N. Murav'ev, N.N. Karamzin, A.F. Merzlyakov, and I.I. Dmitriev. This analysis is followed by some general conclusions on the ballads of the 179Os. The literary ballad developed as a genre independent of folk poetry; the earliest Russian ballads were translations of English and German sources or reworkings of common European motifs. Love is the most common subject of the ballads, and the emphasis centres on the conventionally depicted characters, in particular on the psychology of the heroine. The settings are generalised, and parallels are often drawn between nature and the psychology of the characters. Attempts at local colour are minimal and unsuccessful. The structure of the ballads is relatively simple; authors frequently intrude into the action to comment on its significance. The style of the ballads of the 179Os is characterized by emotionalism in the form of hyperbole, exclamatory and interrogative syntax, and the frequency and choice of epithets. While eighteenth-century vocabulary and syntax tend to be used for the narrative, both the setting and psychology of the characters are usually described in "pre-romantic" language. Both Karamzin's Alina (179Os) and Merzlyakov's Milon (1797) contain a striking contrast between idyll and ballad, between classical and "pre-romantic" styles. Chapter III begins with a bibliographical sketch of biographical and critical studies on Zhukovsky, and with a note on the various editions of his work. It then examines Zhukovsky's theoretical statements about the ballad and compares them with contemporary descriptions of the genre. Both in his own opinion and in the testimony of his contemporaries, Zhukovsky was virtually identified as a balladnik. His choice of the literary ballad is attributed to the genre's popularity in Western European literature, and to the novelty of its exotic world. Zhukovsky's views on translation as expressed in his articles and letters are summarized: the translator is a creator, inspired by what he considers to be the ideal of the source, and seeking to create an effect on the reader equivalent to that produced by the original. As an example of this theory put into practice, Zhukovsky's ballad Rybak (1818) is compared with its source, Goethe's Der Fischer (1778). The sources of Zhukovsky's forty literary ballads are then enumerated, after which eight representative ballads are examined with reference to their subject, characters, setting, theme, and style. Lyudmila (18O8) established the pattern for Zhukovsky's ballads and introduced Bürger's theme into Russian literature; Svetlana (18O8-12) was written as a parody of Lyudmila; in Adel'stan (1813) Southey's ballad was given an original conclusion and a setting which became typical for all Zhukcvsky's ballads; in Ivikovy zhuravli (1813) Zhukovsky transformed Schiller's classical theme and created a mood of profound suspense; Eolova arfa (1814) combined the poet's favourite verbal motifs of youth, silence, and despondency; Gromoboi and Vadim (Dvenadtsat' spyashchikh dev) (1810-17) were written as a great parable of suffering and remorse, aspiration and fulfilment; finally, in Zamok Smal'gol'm (1822) Zhukovsky turned Scott's imitation of a popular ballad into a successful literary ballad. Throughout his career Zhukovsky never altered his choice of sources, his method of transforming European themes, or his individual Russian style. While the events of the original ballad source were usually retained in outline form, the characters were metamorphised into romantic heroes and heroines, whose speech was identical with that of the narrator. The settings were generalised and details of local colour were eliminated or Russianized. Zhukovsky's real theme always remained the same: his own experience of melancholy, anxiety, despair, love, fear, or resignation. The style which expressed this theme was always "literary": its originality resided in the alternating intonations, in the negative constructions, in the syntactical parallelism, and, more significantly, in the frequency, choice, and meaning of his epithets. In Chapter IV the epithets in Zhukovsky's ballads are studied. It begins with a summary of previous definitions of the epithet from Quintilian to the Russian Formalists. A definition is accepted which includes all purely descriptive words under the term "epithet", and allows for a distinction in usage or function. A.V. Isachenko's grammatical classification of adjectival epithets is adopted. After an evaluation of previous research on the epithet in Russian folk poetry, in English and German literary ballads, and in eighteenth-century Russian poetry, the following conclusions are drawn: firstly, there is little variety and no complexity in the epithets of Russian folk ballads - indeed, the range and use of the epithet is very limited; secondly, epithets in folk ballads differ fundamentally from those in literary ballads: the concrete, unambiguous epithets of the former are replaced in the latter by emotional, connotative epithets; thirdly, from its relatively insignificant role in the classical style of Lomonosov and Sumarokov, the epithet increases in importance in Russian poetry during the late eighteenth century.