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A study of the German influence on the Russian Revolution in 1917, including the German-Bolshevik conspiracy and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

No description available.

No description available.

The course of history has been greatly defined by political and social events of tremendous significance; revolutions. Several of the most influential international alliances and feuds of the twenty-first century were generated by these occurrences, and states such as Russia and Iran have managed to deeply impact the international world order through their revolutionary behavior and ideology. It is due to its complexity and historical impact that the study of revolutions has informed the theoretical analyzes of political scientists. This study discusses prominent theories of revolution to provide an analytical framework: Marxism, Modernization, Relative Deprivation, and Mobilization. The thesis then assesses these theories by applying them to two of the most influential revolutions of the twentieth century: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the Muslim Revolution of 1979 in Iran. Each case study addresses the economic, social, and political conditions present prior to each society’s respective revolution. A final comparison of both case studies, based on revolutionary theories, reveals the specific variables necessary for the formation and success of revolutionary movements.

Scholarship on politics and popular culture is constantly evolving in the field of media and communications. Analyzing diverse types of mediated texts, especially the ones that are structured as narratives, such works aim to show how the cultural evolves from the political and vice versa. While storytelling in social media has attracted many scholars, it is mostly neglected from the perspective of politics and popular culture. The probable reason for this is that social media for long time have not introduced any new types of popular culture mediated texts, which would be impossible to imagine without the opportunities of Web 2.0. Through examining “1917. Free history” – a project dedicated to the anniversary of the Russian revolution – this study aims to fill the research gap and expand the scholarship on politics and popular culture to the storytelling in social media. It examines the theoretical paradigm of mediated historicity with the help of content analysis, and the concepts of narrative, myth and ideology with the help of narrative analysis. For the former, the results show how remediation in pursuit of immediacy, expressed in implicitly hiding the initial contexts of production of the texts, constructs the mediated historicity of the project. For the latter, the results show that the political narratives of “1917” are constructed as agoras holding different competing myths which make equipollent ideologies appear natural. These practices are mutually beneficial and their interconnections are understood by applying a theory of the Russian identity which corresponds to the notion of identity as a national mythscape. This work could have a potential impact on narrative and discourse methodologies for the popular culture mediated texts in social media. It could also contribute to the theoretical debates on mediated historicity and research on national identity, cosmopolitan identity and nationalism in social media.

This dissertation describes and analyzes the financial boom that made Russia the largest net international debtor in the world by 1914, as well as the Bolshevik default of 1918 -- one of the biggest in international financial history. For the Bolsheviks the default was a highly significant attack on "finance capital." Yet few historians have paid much attention to the financial history of the Russian Revolution. This study focuses in particular on the decision-making of the small but influential group of financiers and government officials who acted as the "gatekeepers" of international finance, channeling international capital to Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. / History

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.