The goal of this research is to discover Shostakovich's inspiration and motivation for writing the Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues. Through the in-depth research of the cycle, this thesis will discuss the different aspects of the unique harmonic ambiguity of both the preludes and the fugue subjects so that readers understand Shostakovich's language of musical communication. Shostakovich lived during a transitional period in the history of Russia when totalitarianism was being challenged. The research will also explore how the political environment influenced his composition during those years. / by Jihong Park. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis addresses the question of how and why the function of regional organisations varies in different areas of the world. It contributes with insights from the post-Soviet space. A theoretically informed empirical study examines how two former Soviet republics conceptualise the function of two regional organisations: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Organisation for Democracy and Economic Development – GUAM (GUAM). The literature agrees that the two like other organisations in the post-Soviet space do not produce integration or other forms of regional governance. Nevertheless, the member states continue to actively participate in these organisations. The thesis inquires to which end the states continue their membership. The analytical perspective examines how the member states’ conceptualisations of an organisation’s function depend on the domestic political regimes. The thesis considers two members of the CIS and GUAM. One, Azerbaijan, has a hybrid regime with an authoritarian shape. The other, Ukraine, has a hybrid regime with stronger affinity towards democracy. It is argued that policy-makers conceptualise the function of a regional organisation according to the patterns of rule in their domestic political regimes. The ruling elite’s conceptualisation may diverge from the stated function of the organisation, if the stated function is not compatible with the domestic political regime.

Structure, organisation, an idea of esprit de corps, and hierarchy characterised the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Throughout the history of the Soviet Union only the Soviet Armed Forces had the potential to rival the CPSU in those qualities and were able to be an organised locus for potential opposition. A sense of professionalism was instilled in the Soviet Armed Forces, not only from those ‘Red Commanders’ of the Revolution and Civil War, but also from those junior, noncommissioned officers who were holdovers from the tsarist regime. The primary focus of this study is on the immediate post-Stalinist era while Nikita Khrushchev was First Secretary of the CPSU. Bridled by Stalin’s hold over strategic and armed forces policy, after his death, the Soviet Armed Forces became an institution that illustrated a strong sense of military professionalism, while at the same time serving the Soviet regime. With a focus on five case studies that occurred during the Khrushchev era 1953-1964, this thesis argues that the military attempted to remain apolitical throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Previous studies of Soviet civil-military relations have focused on the levels of cooperation or competition between the CPSU and the Soviet armed forces. This study argues however, that the ebb and flow of that relationship can be explained by the selection of personalities, or agents, by Khrushchev to posts of military command. Officers were promoted based on several factors. However, Khrushchev increasingly promoted officers to positions of command who he deemed were more personally loyal to him and were willing to put that loyalty above their duty to the Soviet armed forces. Khrushchev chose personal loyalty over an officer’s military professionalism and expertise when appointing them to posts at the Ministry of Defence, the Soviet General Staff, and to the command posts in the branches of the Soviet military and key military districts around the Soviet Union.

In January 1912, the Bolsheviks became a separate Party, as opposed to being merely a faction of the RSDLP. Lenin's initial problem was to convince both the leaders of the Second International and his own middle echelon leaders inside Russia that Bolshevism was distinct from Menshevism. This proved difficult before August 1914. The War made the distinction clearer, but also gave rise to an international tendency, with support inside the Bolshevik Party, to the Left even of Lenin. Inside Russia too, joint work with SR Maximalists fostered a kind of Left Populist Bolshevism among some of the Party rank and file. After the February Revolution, the Right Bolsheviks were pushing for a reunification with the Mensheviks, the Left Populist Bolsheviks began to organise nationally and, as the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee lacked authority, the Party was on the verge of a split. Lenin was urgently recalled from abroad. His intervention in the faction fight marked the end of one period of Party history and the beginning of the next. For the first time, the Party leadership was on the spot, and this contact with the rank and file enabled Lenin to clarify and develop ideas he had been formulating in his disputes abroad. The result was a new policy for the Party, quite unmistakeably distinct from Menshevism.

The thesis examines the influence of external advice on domestic reform in a post-communist state following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As an example of this, the research analyses the role of international assistance in the reform of public administration in Ukraine in the period 2000 to 2012, with particular reference to the relationship between the national and sub-national tiers of government. Two empirical case studies, on fiscal decentralisation and regional policy, are employed to provide an in-depth analysis of reform programmes introduced by the Government of Ukraine and an examination of the contribution of external advice to each. The thesis draws on concepts from Institutional Theory, Comparative Politics and Development Studies to explain the interaction between external donors and the domestic recipients of their advice. It is argued that international assistance to public administrative reform in Ukraine is a form of normative institutional isomorphism involving the deliberate transfer of models of state institutions from donor countries where they are regarded as good practice. The findings of the case studies indicate the narrow circumstances in which this transaction may lead to short-term progress with reform, through the establishment of a policy transfer network linking domestic and external actors. However the case studies also demonstrate that in the longer term both these attempts at reform, and the international advice which contributed to them, failed to achieve a sustained outcome. Employing the political economy analysis of development aid the thesis argues that the international community bears a large share of the responsibility for this owing to the technocratic nature of assistance programmes and their limited engagement with the political realities of reform processes.

The purpose of this thesis is to establish the contribution of the Soviet weekly, Literaturnaya gazeta, to the debunking of official dogmas during the Brezhnev years. Launched in 1967, the second section of Literaturnaya gazeta has frequently been dismissed as a mere safety valve, highly controlled by the authorities, to placate the educated middle classes demoralized by the conservative backlash. It is argued in this study that, although the paper accepted the political parameters of the post-Thaw conservative leadership, as evinced, in particular, by the extreme limitations of the economic debates and the absence of any material investigating the country’s Stalinist past, it nevertheless succeeded in promoting values which ran counter to the official ideology. The paper reflected the demoralization of Soviet society and its inability to change within the existing structures. Soviet society emerged as being morally corrupt, riddled with individualism, suspicion and petty authoritarianism. Individuals were shown at the mercy of faceless bureaucracies and overpowered by a judiciary system dominated by the state procuracy. The paper actively promoted a more individual-centred type of society by overtly challenging the collectivist ethos, campaigning for the recognition of consumer rights and arguing the case for a fairer judiciary system.

This thesis is concerned with analysing the available data on grain production and its utilisation from the time when the earliest grain statistics became available in pre-revolutionary Russia until the eve of mass transformation of Soviet agriculture that was associated with mass collectivisation in 1929. The pre-revolutionary period and post revolutionary period are treated separately in two separate parts of the thesis. In each part I describe the methods of collecting and organising statistics related to the production and utilisation of grain. I discuss the circumstances in which these statistics were gathered and I attempt to assess the reliability of these data and place them in a more meaningful and more comparative form. I then present an account of the available works that have attempted to analyse the balance of grain production and its utilisation. I conclude by making my own assessment of the balance and compare it with the general conceptions held on the nature of the grain problem. I conclude that the balance of grain production and utilisation was a highly complex phenomenon dependent upon the inter-relationship of demographic, economic and agronomic factors that differed from region to region and from time to time. The full complexity of these inter-relationships was little understood by the political leadership of the time.

This thesis explores dissident theatre in East Central Europe during the second half of the Cold War (1964-1989). Contextualised within the discussion of individual theatrical and performance cultures and practices in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and The German Democratic Republic, it examines how theatre was used to subvert the dominant ideologies and dissent from the status quos in these countries. It establishes a framework that addresses the divergences between Anglo-American political theatre and Eastern Bloc dissident theatre, and discusses the necessity of considering the work of subcultural and subversive artists when analysing work of this kind. The core chapters discuss the theatrical and dramatic techniques, and the intention of the artists with regards to the work itself and to audience interpretation and response in the plays and performances of Václav Havel (Czechoslovakia), Theatre of the Eighth Day (Poland) and Autoperforationsartisten (East Germany). Further, these chapters demonstrate the significant differences in the ways dissident theatre and performance was conceptualised and staged. This thesis also analyses similarities in the theoretical and philosophical motivations for the work of the artists, and the development of ‘second’ or ‘parallel’ societies as a result of the performances.

This thesis explores the nexus between identity construction and the outbreak of violence. It focuses on the cases of violence in Georgia in the early 1990s, in particular – Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The author takes an historical, process-based approach to the question of how violence “came about” in Georgia. Using previously unpublished archival material and extensive, in-depth interviews, the author traces the process of the development of inter-ethnic relations in Georgia over the course of several decades and provides a detailed examination of how these relations evolved from tensions to violence. As the thesis demonstrates, ethnic fears and hostility between Georgians on the one hand and Abkhaz and Ossetians on the other – one of the important contributing factors to the outbreak of violence – were neither deep-rooted nor long-standing; rather, they were socially constructed. Still, despite its socially constructed nature, the author argues for bringing ethnicity back in the debate and proposes a more flexible, multi-layered analytical framework in order to integrate constructivist and primordialist views on ethnicity and ethnic group formation in the study of ethnic conflicts and violence. The result is a shift of analysis from self-centered manipulative elites to more “boundedly rational” actors who operate within a socially constructed reality shaped by Soviet nationality policies and historical and cultural narratives (embedded in myths and metaphors of ethnic groups concerned).

In post-Soviet Russia, the destiny of the Southern Kuril Islands has been used by the political and intellectual elite to define and contest ideas of national identity. From the early 1990s these islands became a symbolic territory for elite groups attempting to define what kind of state the Russian Federation should become. The various geographical visions projected onto these islands are part of a struggle between elite groups to define national values and to claim the state for their own political ends. However, such visions are not smoothly inscribed onto these islands. Instead, any idea of state, nation and homeland is negotiated, contested and inflected at every geographical scale. The debates over these islands expose a deep tension over the political control of space in the Russian Far East and beyond. It is suggested that these islands are a kind of ‘hyper-border’: a site which is distant, and at times even beyond the state’s control, yet at the same time can be instantaneously linked to the destiny of the entire country. It is a term intended to capture the struggles, contestations and unequal power relations inherent in the ideological process of constructing national space and identity.