The aim of this thesis is to define factors that are influential in the ethnic identification process of Crimean Tatars, Russians and Ukrainians in Crimea. To better understand the current ethnic situation in Crimea, Soviet nationality policy as well as Soviet ethnos theory are reviewed. The divergence of the definitions in Soviet and Western traditions is shown. Crucial historical events that took place in Crimea are examined from the viewpoints of Russian, Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, Soviet and Western historiographies. The influence of the historical myths on shaping ethnic boundaries of these ethnic groups in Crimea is shown. Main factors such as the cultural, political, economic, and global ones which are shaping the ethnic self-consciousness of Crimean Tatars, Russians and Ukrainians in Crimea are studied. Therefore the thesis helps us to understand the meaning of being a Russian, an Ukrainian and a Crimean Tatar in Crimea.

This thesis explores the ways in which the Holocaust experiences and memories of Roma communities in post-Socialist Ukraine and Russia have been both remembered and forgotten. In these nations, the Porraimos, meaning the “Great Devouring” in some Romani dialects, has been largely silenced by the politics of national memory, and by the societal discrimination and ostracization of Roma communities. While Ukraine has made strides towards memorializing Porraimos in the last few decades, the Russian state has yet to do the same. I question how experiences of the Porraimos fit into Holocaust memory in these nations, why the memorialization of the Porraimos is important, what the relationship between communal and public memory is, and lastly, how communal Roma memory is instrumental in reshaping the public memory of the Holocaust. I approach these questions through a comparative, interdisciplinary framework that combines historical analysis, interviews with two Russian Roma individuals from St. Petersburg Russia, an overview of existing literature and film that focus on the Porraimos, and a survey of the memorials for Roma victims in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. Using these methods, I determine how the Porraimos fits into political and cultural memory in these nations, and what the future of Porraimos memory might look like. / Graduate

This thesis examines how Soviet psychiatry took the particular form that it did and how it had a historically specific relationship to the state. Psychiatry in the USSR was used by the state against those who opposed the regime. In particular it was used after the death of Stalin against a dissident intelligentsia. Chapter One examines the position of the Soviet psychiatric patient with relation to the political economy of the USSR. The legal position of the psychiatric patient was a precarious one because the absence of private property meant there was no basis for law. It was possible to co-opt doctors as repressive agents of the state because they were dependent on it in a way which their counterparts in the West were not. Chapter Two examines the historical development of Russian and Soviet psychiatry and assesses the importance of its development under tsarism. The point at which Soviet psychiatry became differentiated from world psychiatry is located in the Stalin period. Chapter Three examines the role played by Soviet psychology and the supposed influence of Marxism-Leninism in shaping psychiatry in the USSR. It is argued that Soviet psychology owed nothing to Marxism but that it was distorted in a similar way to other branches of science. Chapter Four discusses the defective nature of Soviet psychiatry and shows how Soviet political economy led to archaic practice in psychiatry. All Soviet medicine was similarly defective and this had serious consequences for the Soviet population as a whole. Chapter Five examines the role that psychiatry played in repressing the dissident movement in the 1960s and 70s. Psychiatry was used as an ameliorated form of the labour camp at a time when mass killings and labour camps were less useful to the elite. Psychiatry played this role from about 1953 until 1988 and was used mostly against the intelligentsia.

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings.

This is an analysis of the nature and political significance of Russian messianism: the idea that the Russian people or the Russian State is the `chosen people' or the `chosen instrument'. I outline the genesis of the theory of Moscow, the Third Rome and discuss the ideas and activities of the nineteenth-century Slavophils, the pan-Slavists, Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. I examine the influence of messianism on Russian Communism, considering Berdiaev's views. The main part of the work investigates the rebirth of interest in Russian messianism in the Brezhnev period. I try to investigate the links between this cultural movement and the Russian nationalist elements within the political éite. My main sources for this are samizdat journals and articles, in particular the journal Veche, cultural journals such as Novyi mir, Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik, Party documents and éigré/ journals. I find that Russian messianism has been especially important at times when the country is in crisis: Russia is in Golgotha, but where there is suffering there is also redemption, not only for Russia but for humanity. It has by no means been always dominant in intellectual thought. It has had little influence (under either tsars or Communists) on the fields of nationality policy, policy towards religion or foreign policy. Today, as in the nineteenth century, its adherents can be opponents or supporters of the existing State structure. The growth of non-Russian nationalism under Gorbachov, combined with glasnost', has fuelled Russian nationalism. This is unlikely to be co-opted into the official ideology, because it would increase the dissatisfaction of the non-Russians.

This thesis is about the renegotiation of Russia’s Far Eastern and Northwestern borders as political and economic spaces. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the opening of these formerly closed borders which provided Russia’s border-regions with opportunities to develop links within the post-Soviet, as well as international political and economic landscapes. From 1992 onwards, their ability to cope with unfolding economic crisis and political uncertainty, which characterized the process of transition in Russia, was considered to be tied to establishing economic and political cross-border links with neighbouring European and Northeast Asian countries. Using the Republic of Karelia and Khabarovskiy kray as case studies, their development and that of their borders as political and economic spaces is analysed, applying the analytical framework developed in this thesis, according to which the complexity of borders can be best grasped by assessing the activities of border actors and institutions at all levels of governance, as well as the interaction of factors pertaining to the border’s spatio-infrastructural, economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions. The findings show that both regions’ borders have been renegotiated to different extents, but that neither the Republic of Karelia nor Khabarovskiy kray have been able to utilise their borders as opportunity structures to the extent originally anticipated. Main problems have been the distinct lack of scope for regional and local state and non-state actors to get sufficiently involved in the governance of their borders as well as the imbalance between the Asian and European vectors in Russian policy-making. The thesis concludes by proposing a system of multi-layered, heterarchic political and economic governance on both regions’ borders with the development of border-spanners and border-spanning institutions at the centre of such a strategy.

In both the 1936 and 1977 USSR Constitutions conscientious labour in socially useful activity was decreed to be a "duty and matter of honour" for every Soviet citizen. This study examines the various approaches adopted by successive Soviet leaderships in their determined efforts to reinforce that ethos. It focuses, in particular, on the so-called "anti-parasite" laws dating back to 1957, when as a part of Khrushchev's attempt to revive popular justice, several smaller republics experimented with enactments that permitted peer justice institutions in the form of amorphous social assemblies to exile "parasites" via a procedure which bypassed the existing court system. Special attention is devoted to the criticism lodged against the laws (during their adoption and spread to the other union republics in 1961) by members of the legal profession, who complained that the wide punitive given to the extra-judicial bodies and the attitudes and behaviour encouraged in them would erode the respect for "socialist legality" which they had been charged with enhancing in the minds of the mass public. Although as a result of such criticism, the Khrushchev regime modified the peer justice institutions in the early 1960's, and even though his populism was absorbed by or subordinated to the normative sector of social control in Brezhnev's legal policy, the study highlights the fact that complaints of abuses and inconsistencies in anti-parasite proceedings continued to be levelled against the prosecution process. This, it is contended, was due in large part to the extreme vagueness of the notion of social parasitism itself, although the lack of a precise and consistent definition of this peculiar offence (and of the key elements which were deemed to constitute it) was actually seen as necessary and even desirable since it allowed the authorities to use the anti-parasite legislation as a weapon of suppression against a broad spectrum of socially, politically, and economically inconvenient groups within Soviet society.

No description available.

The main aim of this dissertation has been to examine the creation, organisation and work of the Red Army's Civil War political apparatus and assess its overall contribution to the Bolshevik war effort. To this end the dissertation itself consists of 4 main chapters and a number of appendices, detailing not only the work of the main political organs of the Red Army, but also the main personalities involved. The first chapter is an introductory chapter, examining the organ, which many Soviet historians have for a long time considered to be the Bolsheviks' first attempt at the creation of a centralised political organ for the Red Army, namely the Organisation-agitation department of the All-Russian Collegiate for the Formation and Organisation of the Red Army. The work carried out for the first chapter then leads to a discussion of the work of arguably the first real attempt by the Bolsheviks to create a properly functioning political organ specifically for the Red Army, namely the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (VBVK). The chapter has been sub-divided into a number of sections, in order to allow a greater detailed examination of the work, personalities and difficulties that the central political apparatus faced in its attempts to exert some sort of control over the various constituent parts of the front political apparatus-the military commissars, the Party cells and the ever-increasing important political departments in the period 1918-1919. That VBVK was not to be a crowning success is revealed by the necessity that the Bolsheviks felt towards the beginning of 1919 to abolish VBVK and create arguably the centralised political organ of the Red Army during the Civil War period-the Political Administration of the Revolutionary Military Soviet of the Republic (PUR). Created in May 1919, PUR was to face many of the same problems that had beset VBVK a year or so earlier but, on the whole, coped with them better and political and cultural-educational work in the Red Army proceeded apace. The final, conclusive chapter brings all the threads together and assesses the claims made for the political work carried out in the front-line Red Army units during 1918-1920 and, whilst admitting that the Bolsheviks did spend much time on promoting the apparatus in a number of ways, the assertions made by generations of Soviet historians concerning the overall value of the political and cultural-educational work carried out in the Red Army are still too grandiose and that there is a lack of concrete evidence available, proving the worth of the political work carried out and its positive military consequences.

This thesis examines the role of the Northern Department of the British Foreign Office and its perception of, and attitude towards, the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1953. In these formative years after World War II many assumptions and policies were shaped that proved decisive for years to come. The Northern Department of the Foreign Office was at the centre of British dealings with the Soviet Union after 1945 in an atmosphere of cooling diplomatic relations between both camps. Keeping channels of communications open in order to exploit every opportunity for negotiation and the settlement of post-war issues, officials built up an extensive expertise of Soviet domestic and foreign policy. Their focus on all aspects of Soviet life accessible to them, for example, Soviet domestic and international propaganda, revealed in their view a significant emerging future threat to British interests in Europe and worldwide. This view provided the basis of the analysis of new information and the assessment of the best possible policy options for the British government. The Northern Department tried to exploit those traits of Soviet policy that could persuade the USA and Western Europe to follow British foreign policy initiatives vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the early Cold War while attempting to balance those weaknesses that could harm this effort. The focus of the Department often varied as a result of Soviet action. Some issues, like the Cominform were of momentary importance while other issues, like the Communist threat and the issue of Western European defence remained on the agenda for many years. A realistic approach to foreign policy allowed officials to exploit and counter-act those Soviet foreign policies seen as most threatening to Britain and those most likely to aid Britain’s recovery of her much desired world role. While the initial optimism after 1945 soon faded and consolidation on both sides was followed by confrontation, officials in London and the embassy in Moscow tried to maintain diplomatic relations to aid Western recovery efforts and support the new foreign policy doctrine of containment. When by the early 1950s entrenchment was speeding up in East and West, the Northern Department nevertheless utilised the available information to support British foreign policy worldwide as well as strengthen the domestic effort to explain the increasing international tension to the British people. Realism on the part of officials, and awareness of the information and options available to them meant that a Britain closely allied to the USA but one that continued to talk to the Kremlin was seen as the best way to achieve a continued world role for Britain and a safe Europe.