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The Russian engineering corps was almost completely transformed during the first five-year plan, which ran from 1928-1932. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the nature of that change, and the forces that drove it. In this paper, I will argue that the corps was transformed in four fundamental ways: class composition, skill level, role in production, and political orientation. This paper begins by examining the old engineering corps on the eve of the first five year plan. Specifically, it examines Russian engineers as a subgroup of the intelligentsia, and how that problematized their relationship with power. I next examine how the Soviet government forcibly reshaped the engineering corps by pressure from above, specifically by a combination of state terror and worker-promotion campaigns. These two phenomena were closely intertwined. Along with collectivization and crash industrialization, they were part of the "Cultural Revolution" that reshaped Russian society in this period. I next examine how the campaign of terror against engineers was used by Stalin and his camp for political gain on a variety of fronts. Lastly, I will examine how engineers became part of the Soviet elite after 1931. For sources, I rely especially on the correspondence between Stalin, Kaganovich, and Molotov, which was published in the Yale University Annals of Communism series. I also draw heavily on The Harvard Refugee Interview Project, memoirs, and the collected works of Joseph Stalin. / History

The early twentieth century was the apogee of what historians have come to call a `white slavery' panic, a period in which long term anxieties about the social dangers and moral ambiguities of sex work metamorphosed into an intense philanthropic, public and state focus on forced migration for the purposes of prostitution. This dissertation investigates the origins of `the traffic in women' as a social problem in imperial Russian and Soviet law and society, connecting it to emergent regimes of transnational biopolitics at the fin-de-siècle and through the interwar years. This period was one in which state and social understandings of the subject's freedom, to move across borders or to consent to sex, were being reconceptualized. I argue that the traffic in women, as a legal category and cultural discourse, was key to this process of reconceptualization, as it became a heuristic for making sense of the entanglement of legality, clandestinity, consent and coercion operational in cross border migration, particularly that which involved sex work, in an age of rapid globalization. Consequently, this dissertation helps us to understand how certain conceptions of gendered and sexualized bodies have become central to questions of state security and sovereignty. / History

abstract: This dissertation explores the roles of ethnic minority cultural elites in the development of socialist culture in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s through the late 1960s. Although Marxist ideology predicted the fading away of national allegiances under communism, Soviet authorities embraced a variety of administrative and educational policies dedicated to the political, economic, and cultural modernization of the country’s non-Russian populations. I analyze the nature and implementation of these policies from the perspective of ethnic Tatars, a Muslim Turkic group and contemporary Russia’s largest minority. Tatar cultural elites utilized Soviet-approved cultural forms and filled them with Tatar cultural content from both the pre-Revolutionary past and the socialist present, creating art and literature that they saw as contributing to both the Tatar nation and to Soviet socialism. I argue that these Tatar cultural elites believed in the emancipatory potential of Soviet socialism and that they felt that national liberation and national development were intrinsic parts of the Soviet experiment. Such idealism remained present in elite discourses through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s, but after Stalin’s death it was joined by open disillusionment with what some Tatars identified as a nascent Russocentrism in Soviet culture. The coexistence of these two strands of thought among Tatar cultural elites suggests that the integration of Tatar national culture into the broad, internationalist culture envisioned by Soviet authorities in Moscow was a complex and disputed process which produced a variety of outcomes that continue to characterize Tatar culture in the post-Soviet period. This dissertation is based on significant archival research and utilizes various state and Communist Party documents, as well as memoirs, letters, and other personal sources in both Russian and Tatar. It challenges traditional periodization by bridging the Stalin and post-Stalin eras and emphasizes on-the-ground developments rather than official state policy. Finally, it offers insight into the relationship between communism and ethnic difference and presents a nuanced vision of Soviet power that helps to explain the continuing role of nationalism in the contemporary Russian Federation and other post-communist states. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2019

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This dissertation seeks to provide an empirical evaluation of whether scholars are justified in calling for the end of the transition paradigm, the dominant model of democratization study among Comparative Politics scholars. My thesis argues that the predominant emphasis on elections and institutions among transition theorists is largely ineffective in understanding democratic transitions in the former Soviet Union. To test my thesis, I conduct qualitative case studies of Ukraine and Russia that focus on the role of elections and institutions in the transition process. Under the transitions model, one would reasonably expect the transition process in each country to be relatively similar, given the similar timing and manner in which elections and institutions were implemented, coupled with strong geographic, cultural, and historic commonalities. Instead, both cases have experienced highly divergent paths of development with varied levels of success. This comprehensive study sheds serious doubt on the ability of the transitions model to accurately comprehend the dynamics of democratic development in the former Soviet Union. Though many scholars have criticized certain assumptions or components of the transitions model, few if any, have constructed a comprehensive, empirical analysis of the transitions model on its own terms.

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This paper documents the underlying support many left-leaning Quakers had for the Bolshevik Revolution, displayed through the relief operations of the American Friends Service Committee in Russia from 1919-1931. While the Friends have carried out relief efforts in many areas of the world in their spirit of Christian fellowship, there was added excitement for the work in Russia due to the Bolsheviks' goals of social justice. Therefore, much of why the Friends went, why they stayed so long, and how they were able to achieve so much was due to the influence of communist sympathies in and around Quaker circles. The mission achieved a special place in the minds of many AFSC workers and officials because of these communist sympathies, which eventually blinded many Quakers to the atrocities of the Russian Revolution and the nature of the emerging Soviet regime. / History