Neighborhood in Minsk built for the workers of the tractor plant became a site of creation of soviet man. Architecture of socialist realism itself played a positive role: it played in tune with postwar longing for peaceful life in privacy, with family with comfortable structure of enclosed blocks, and at the same time created a background and scenery of life that elevated man through classicist image. Village youth came to the site driven by the postwar hunger and need to reconstruct their lives together with the country. They became workers, appropriated shop floor practice and were life-long recipients of the soviet distribution system that included housing as the main resource. People learned to live and work for future, "when communism arrives", withdrawing to privacy from the slogans, not paying attention to the latter but in that very moment rejecting the sphere of public life its real power, denying possibility to change.

Объектом данного исследования является сталинская культура. Целью работы было выявление специфики влияния макросоциального процесса модернизации на становление сталинской культуры Основная гипотеза заключается в том, что, по нашему мнению, советская культура 30-50-х и все, что с ней связано, является результатом сталинской модернизации и не могла существовать вне этого макросоциального процесса. Благодаря тому, что этот процесс был неполноценным относительно европейской модернизации (и ее продуктов), весомую роль в ней играло искусство (соцреализм), которое одновременно являлось таким же средством модернизации, как и индустриализация. Искусство оказалось средством формирования системы представления о мире, являлось способом трансляции ценностей, что говорит о нем как способе воспроизводства сталинской культуры. В ходе работы удалось выяснить, что сталинская модернизация как макросоциальный процесс обладает признаками западной модернизации, но ее инструментарий наследует много из того, что было в отечественной истории. Советская модернизация обладала своим собственным преобразовательным пафосом в отношении переустройства человеческой жизни. Проект модернизации был направлен на достижение определенной социальной утопии, где большую роль играл бы труд как воспитательный механизм. Само существование человека в этой системе несло онтологический характер, труд – воспитательный. Соответственно реальность, в т.ч. трудовая, подменялась синтетическим образом желаемой действительности, которая примирялась с окружающим миром за счет дерализации. Искусство в такой ситуации становится реальным рычагом модернизации и способом построения определенной картины мира, который дополняет прочие рычаги: политический и экономический. / The object of this study is the Stalinist culture. The aim of the work was to determine the specificity of the effect of macro-modernization process on the development of Stalinist culture The main hypothesis is that, in our opinion, the Soviet culture 30-50th and everything connected with it, is the result of Stalin's modernization and could not exist outside of this macro-process. Due to the fact that the process was defective with respect to the modernization of the European (and its products), a significant role in it played an art (the Socialist Realism) that is both the same means of modernization, as well as industrialization. Art was a means of forming a system of beliefs about the world, it is a method of translation of values, which speaks of it as a method of reproduction of the Stalinist culture. During the work we found out that Stalin's modernization as the macro-process has signs of Western modernization, but it inherits many of the tools that have been in the country's history. Soviet modernization has its own transformative fervor against reorganization of human life. The modernization project was aimed at achieving a particular social utopia, where he played a major role to work as an educational mechanism. The very existence of man in this system carried ontological character, work - educational. Accordingly reality, including labor, supplanted by synthetic way the desired effect, which is at peace with the world around them by deralization. The art in this situation becoming a real lever of modernization and a certain way to build a picture of the world that complements the other levers: political and economic.

This Master’s thesis explores Jewish masculinity and identity within early twentieth-century literature (1903-1925), using texts written by Jewish authors in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. This was a period of change for Russia’s Jewish community, involving increased secularization and reform, massive pogroms such as in Kishinev in 1903, newfound leadership within the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, and a rise in both Zionist and Revolutionary ideology. Subsequently, Jewish literary masculinity experienced a significant shift in characterization. Historically, a praised Jewish man had been portrayed as gentle, scholarly, and faithful, yet early twentieth century Jewish male literary figures were asked to be physically strong, hypermasculine, and secular. This thesis first uses H.N. Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter” (1903) and Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye Goes to Palestine” (1914) to introduce a concept of “Jewish shame,” or a sentiment that historical Jewish masculinity was insufficient for a contemporary Russian world. It then creates two models for these new men to follow. The Assimilatory Jew, seen in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry cycle (published throughout the 1920s), held that perpetual outsider Jewish men should imitate the behaviour of a secular whole in order to be accepted. The Jewish Superman is depicted in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “In Memory of Herzl” (1904) and Ilya Selvinsky’s “Bar Kokhba” (1920), and argues that masculine glory is entirely compatible with a proud Jewish identity, without an external standard needed. Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity are used to analyze these diverse works, published in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian by authors of varying political alignments, to establish commonalities among these literary canons and plot a new spectrum of desired identities for Jewish men. / Graduate / 2020-04-10