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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

Ethnic violence broke out in the Soviet Union during the second half of Mikhail Gorbachev's time as Soviet leader. In general, Soviet leaders were taken by surprise by the upsurge in nationalism in the USSR. They came to believe that Communism had supplanted nationalism in the Soviet Union, but they were proven wrong. It is the thesis of this project that territoriality is the underlying factor behind the ethnic conflicts that broke out in the last years of the USSR and the first years of the post-Soviet era. It is a psychological program in the human mind that defines what are the "proper" boundaries of a polity. Since territoriality is a constant, there exist six identifiable facilitating factors that condition how territoriality leads to ethnic violence. These facilitating conditions are the size of an ethnicity (majority/minority status), economic resource differences, the availability of information, the presence of an ethnic diaspora nearby, the location of a polity, and the role of the elites. To address the issues surrounding the territorial basis of ethnic conflict, an exploratory, heuristic, most-similar systems comparative case study approach is employed. This project's temporal domain is 1988 to the present, and the polities selected for examination are Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova, and Chechnya. In addition, two non-events are chosen for study: Tatarstan and Crimea. In the non-events, ethnic violence did not break out on a sustained and prolonged scale. Territoriality was present in all of the examined cases except for the second Chechen war (1999-), which mutated from an ethnic conflict into a religious struggle on the Chechen rebel side. The facilitating factors are present in some form in the five cases.

<p> This dissertation aims in part to redress the shortage of close readings of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Aleksandr Rodchenko's joint project, the book <i> Pro Eto.</i> It explores the relationship between the book's visual and verbal aspects, treating the book and its images as objects that repay attentive looking and careful analysis. By these means this dissertation finds that the images do not simply illustrate the text, but have an intertextual relationship with it: sometimes the images suggest their own, alternative narrative, offering scenes that do not exist in the poem; sometimes they act as literary criticism, suggesting interpretations, supplying biographical information, and highlighting with their own form aspects of the poem's. </p><p> This analysis reveals <i>Pro Eto</i>'s strong links with distant forms of art and literature. The poem's intricate ties to the book of Genesis and Victor Shklovsky's novel <i>Zoo,</i> written while the former literary critic was in exile in Berlin, evince an ambivalence about the manifestations of socialism in early-1920s Russia that is missing from much of Mayakovsky's work. At the same time Rodchenko's images, with their repeated references to Byzantine icons and Dadaist photomontage, expand the poem's scope and its concerns far beyond NEP-era Moscow. Thus my analysis finds that although <i> Pro Eto</i> is considered to be an emblematic Constructivist work, many of the received ideas about Russian Constructivism&mdash;the unswerving zeal of its practitioners, the utility of its production, and in particular the ideology-driven, <i>sui-generis</i> nature of the movement itself&mdash;are not supported by the book. <i>Pro Eto</i>'s deep connections with art and literature outside of Bolshevik Russia contradict the idea&mdash;first set out by the Constructivists themselves and widely accepted by subsequent scholars&mdash;of Constructivism as an autochthonous movement, born of theory, and indebted neither to historical art movements nor to contemporary western ones. My analysis suggests that reading Pro Eto through the lens of Constructivist theory denies the work the richness, ambivalence and humor it gains when that theory is understood as being in conversation with artistic practice, rather than defining it.</p>