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This paper surveys U.S. foreign policy in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the American administration reacted to the Soviet Union's interventions in Afghanistan and Poland and to its planned gas pipeline to Western Europe. Chapter I outlines the origins of the pipeline project; Chapters II and III describe U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviets during the Carter and Reagan administrations. Chapter IV focuses on the economic sanctions imposed against the Soviet Union by the United States and their failure to block or delay the pipeline, and Chapter V stresses the inability of economic sanctions-- in this and other instances--to achieve political ends.

This is a study of the foreign and domestic policies of the USSR as they pertain to its war-readiness, as well as the degree to which these policies presumably opened the door to the European conflagration and, in 1941, to the Nazi-Soviet war. Topics to be discussed include: (1) the crash industrialization of the Soviet Union and industrial war preparations from 1928--41; (2) the development of Soviet military doctrine before and after 12 June 1937; (3) a critical re-examination of the popularly accepted reasons for the devolution of the Soviet armed forces; and (4) Soviet foreign policy from 1937--41. The chronological end of the paper (1941) is followed by a brief epilogue discussing the evident success of the Soviet industrialization program by reference to Soviet industrial performance during the Nazi-Soviet war. Furthermore, the epilogue will challenge the popular depiction of the German invasion as an effortless, seamless advance into the Soviet heartland.

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After the Bolshevik assumption of power in 1917, the arguably much more difficult task of creating a revolutionary society began. In 1919, to ensure Russian women supported the Communist party, the Zhenotdel, or women’s department, was established. Its aim was propagating the Communist party’s message through local branches attached to party committees at every level of the hierarchy. This dissertation is an analysis of the Communist party’s Zhenotdel in Petrograd/ Leningrad during the 1920s. Most Western Zhenotdel histories were written in the pre-archival era, and this is the first study to extensively utilize material in the former Leningrad party archive, TsGAIPD SPb. Both the quality and quantity of Zhenotdel fonds is superior at St.Peterburg’s TsGAIPD SPb than Moscow’s RGASPI. While most scholars have used Moscow-centric journals like "Kommunistka", "Krest’ianka" and "Rabotnitsa", this study has thoroughly utilized the Leningrad Zhenotdel journal "Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka" and a rich and extensive collection of Zhenotdel questionnaires. Women’s speeches from Zhenotdel conferences, as well as factory and field reports, have also been folded into the dissertation’s five chapters on: organizational issues, the unemployed, housewives and prostitutes, peasants, and workers. Fundamentally, this dissertation argues that how Zhenotdel functioned at the local level revealed that the organization as a whole was riven with multiple and conflicting tensions. Zhenotdel was unworkable. Zhenotdel’s broad goals were impeded because activists lacked financial and jurisdictional autonomy, faced party ambivalence and hostility, and operated largely with volunteers. Paradoxically, these volunteer delegates were “interns,” yet they were expected to model exemplary behaviour. With limited resources, delegates were also expected to fulfil an ever-expanding list of tasks. In addition, Zhenotdel’s extensive use of unpaid housewife delegates in the 1920s anticipated the wife-activist movement of voluntary social service work in the middle to late 1930s. There were competing visions for NEP society, and Zhenotdel officials were largely unable to negotiate the importance of their organization to other party and state organizations. Overall, this suggests that although the political revolution was successful in the 1920s, there were profound limits to the social and cultural revolution in this era.

After the Bolshevik assumption of power in 1917, the arguably much more difficult task of creating a revolutionary society began. In 1919, to ensure Russian women supported the Communist party, the Zhenotdel, or women’s department, was established. Its aim was propagating the Communist party’s message through local branches attached to party committees at every level of the hierarchy. This dissertation is an analysis of the Communist party’s Zhenotdel in Petrograd/ Leningrad during the 1920s. Most Western Zhenotdel histories were written in the pre-archival era, and this is the first study to extensively utilize material in the former Leningrad party archive, TsGAIPD SPb. Both the quality and quantity of Zhenotdel fonds is superior at St.Peterburg’s TsGAIPD SPb than Moscow’s RGASPI. While most scholars have used Moscow-centric journals like "Kommunistka", "Krest’ianka" and "Rabotnitsa", this study has thoroughly utilized the Leningrad Zhenotdel journal "Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka" and a rich and extensive collection of Zhenotdel questionnaires. Women’s speeches from Zhenotdel conferences, as well as factory and field reports, have also been folded into the dissertation’s five chapters on: organizational issues, the unemployed, housewives and prostitutes, peasants, and workers. Fundamentally, this dissertation argues that how Zhenotdel functioned at the local level revealed that the organization as a whole was riven with multiple and conflicting tensions. Zhenotdel was unworkable. Zhenotdel’s broad goals were impeded because activists lacked financial and jurisdictional autonomy, faced party ambivalence and hostility, and operated largely with volunteers. Paradoxically, these volunteer delegates were “interns,” yet they were expected to model exemplary behaviour. With limited resources, delegates were also expected to fulfil an ever-expanding list of tasks. In addition, Zhenotdel’s extensive use of unpaid housewife delegates in the 1920s anticipated the wife-activist movement of voluntary social service work in the middle to late 1930s. There were competing visions for NEP society, and Zhenotdel officials were largely unable to negotiate the importance of their organization to other party and state organizations. Overall, this suggests that although the political revolution was successful in the 1920s, there were profound limits to the social and cultural revolution in this era.

After having reached a level of influence unmatched by any other element of Soviet government under Stalin and Beria, the security organs of the Soviet Union proved difficult to tame. While it has been argued that the KGB was made subservient to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the ascent of Khrushchev in the late 1950's, this essay will attempt to show that the security police apparatus was able to maintain a high level of prominence and even autonomy throughout the history of the Soviet Union and beyond. While it may have appeared that the organs were under constraints during periods of unchallenged leadership, the lack of a legislative definition of the KGB's role made the possibility of a coup or putsch a constant threat. During periods of instability, particularly those surrounding the succession struggles, the KGB was able to act independently and was highly influential as to the outcome of these contests. In the latter years of the Soviet era, efforts to alter the system in order to avoid the excesses of previous years revealed the organs to be highly adaptable and cognizant of the need to change to avoid being excluded from the political decision-making process. Through an assessment of the various succession struggles and efforts to place the organs within the confines of legality, the political power of the KGB may be better understood, and placed in a historical perspective side by side with its post-Soviet counterpart, which too is shown to have survived recent upheavals.

This study explores the life of the prominent Russian Orientalist and colonial administrator Aleksandr Semenov (1873-1958). In the course of his long and versatile career in Central Asia - where he came to in 1901 as a low-ranking member of Turkestan's colonial administration, and where he died in 1958 as the first director of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Tajikistan's Academy of Sciences - Semenov participated in the transformation of the region from a Tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an 'Empire of Nations'. His influence on national historiography and notions of national identity was especially marked in the case of the Soviet Union's only Persian-speaking republic, Tajikistan, with which Semenov was connected through his interest and expertise in Persianate Central Asia. This thesis even goes so far as to argue that Semenov's scholarship and his work as an advisor to the Soviet government facilitated the very establishment of Tajikistan, which Paul Bergne has described as a nation initially promoted by Russian Orientalists. Further research in Russian archives is required, however, to better substantiate this claim. Rather than focussing on the (early) Soviet period and on so-called national territorial delimitation of Central Asia, as scholars such as Hirsch and Arne Haugen have done, the present study, in the vein of scholars like Vera Tolz and Vladimir Genis, highlights the ways in which both Bolshevik nationalities policy and Soviet Oriental Studies grew out of the studying and ruling of Central Asia in the late imperial period. It does so through an examination of Semenov's career, scholarship and personal networks, and on the basis of his personal archive in Tajikistan's Academy of Sciences, which has not been researched in any systematic way since the early 1970s, and in which no scholar from outside the former Soviet Union has ever worked.

Estonia's rise to prominence on the leading edge of the Soviet reform process is a consequence of the republic's dual position as an economic role model for other republics and a Soviet exception in terms of lifestyle and cultural orientation. While Estonia's open acceptance of perestroika is clearly a boost for Soviet reformers, the Estonian vision of reform is distinctly different from the direction intended by Moscow. In its capacity as reform leader and radical pioneer, Estonia is a microcosm of the Soviet political economy and the elements that plague attempts to reform the system. An examination of Estonia's role within the Soviet reform movement provides a view of the potentially explosive cultural processes that have now surfaced not only in the Baltic but throughout the Soviet Union. Chapter One presents a descriptive chronological overview of the events that preceded Estonia's Declaration of Sovereignty in November 1988. Chapter Two is analytical in nature and provides a cultural context and background with which to assess Estonian developments. The methodological framework is adapted from Archie Brown's "Political Culture and Communist Studies" and gives a qualitative description of the intensity and psychological power of the cultural factor in Estonian politics. Chapter Three presents Moscow's reaction to Baltic initiatives and describes Gorbachev's attempt to forge a new nationalities policy in the face of deep-rooted conservative opposition. Estonia is a prime example of the seemingly insoluble nationality problems associated with Soviet political reform. In terms of quantitative indicators, Estonia is the most economically successful republic within the Soviet political experiment, and yet it is also the most vociferous in voicing rejection of fundamental Soviet political values. Although the Soviet future remains unpredictable, there are strong indicators that Estonia and the Baltic republics will continue to expand the perimeters of reform at a pace and in a manner that can now only be curtailed by armed force. However, the potential consequences of Baltic initiatives will not remain confined only to Soviet domestic politics. Whether the Soviet Union becomes a benign Commonwealth or Confederacy, or rapidly decays or disintegrates, or regresses into authoritarianism and civil war, the result will have profound consequences for Europe and the rest of the world. Therefore, the importance of Estonia and the other Baltic republics in the process of Soviet decline cannot be underestimated; the Baltic States, although insignificant by global standards, have set an example for other Soviet republics and national groups to follow and will for the near term remain political barometers of the Soviet future. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate