This thesis examines how Soviet psychiatry took the particular form that it did and how it had a historically specific relationship to the state. Psychiatry in the USSR was used by the state against those who opposed the regime. In particular it was used after the death of Stalin against a dissident intelligentsia. Chapter One examines the position of the Soviet psychiatric patient with relation to the political economy of the USSR. The legal position of the psychiatric patient was a precarious one because the absence of private property meant there was no basis for law. It was possible to co-opt doctors as repressive agents of the state because they were dependent on it in a way which their counterparts in the West were not. Chapter Two examines the historical development of Russian and Soviet psychiatry and assesses the importance of its development under tsarism. The point at which Soviet psychiatry became differentiated from world psychiatry is located in the Stalin period. Chapter Three examines the role played by Soviet psychology and the supposed influence of Marxism-Leninism in shaping psychiatry in the USSR. It is argued that Soviet psychology owed nothing to Marxism but that it was distorted in a similar way to other branches of science. Chapter Four discusses the defective nature of Soviet psychiatry and shows how Soviet political economy led to archaic practice in psychiatry. All Soviet medicine was similarly defective and this had serious consequences for the Soviet population as a whole. Chapter Five examines the role that psychiatry played in repressing the dissident movement in the 1960s and 70s. Psychiatry was used as an ameliorated form of the labour camp at a time when mass killings and labour camps were less useful to the elite. Psychiatry played this role from about 1953 until 1988 and was used mostly against the intelligentsia.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the geo-strategic and political factors which constitute the prevailing security environment in North East Asia, with particular emphases on the pivotal position of Korean peninsula and the crucial influence of superpower naval balances and strategic developments. A major element of this examination is the assessment of the health of the contemporary security arrangement in North East Asia, within and between the various 'camp'', and how best to remedy any shortcoming.This thesis suggests that the balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union is changing in favour of the latter and that military stability between East and West is being undermined. If not arrested, these trends will increase and exacerbate political-military divisions in the Far East. This situation could well result in any one of the states which have an interest in the region enhancing its arsenal to use such military hardware for the protection of its vulnerable interests.The thesis puts forward a number of propositions concerning the likely future evolution of the strategic environment and military situation, especially the political and naval dimensions, in the Far East. In its analysis the thesis considers a wide range of trends and developments, but does not lose sight of the central military-security issues, especially - in a region where the sea is such a vital strategic and economic issue - naval matters. It is the intention of the thesis to provide a unique examination of international security in North East Asia - unique in its contemporary nature, unique in its regional scope, and unique in relating internal and external political and economic issues of the interested regional states to central strategic issues, in particular superpower maritime strength. This thesis assesses the implications of these developments for South Korean security relations in particular, and suggests several issues for future consideration.

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings.

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This is an analysis of the nature and political significance of Russian messianism: the idea that the Russian people or the Russian State is the `chosen people' or the `chosen instrument'. I outline the genesis of the theory of Moscow, the Third Rome and discuss the ideas and activities of the nineteenth-century Slavophils, the pan-Slavists, Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. I examine the influence of messianism on Russian Communism, considering Berdiaev's views. The main part of the work investigates the rebirth of interest in Russian messianism in the Brezhnev period. I try to investigate the links between this cultural movement and the Russian nationalist elements within the political éite. My main sources for this are samizdat journals and articles, in particular the journal Veche, cultural journals such as Novyi mir, Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik, Party documents and éigré/ journals. I find that Russian messianism has been especially important at times when the country is in crisis: Russia is in Golgotha, but where there is suffering there is also redemption, not only for Russia but for humanity. It has by no means been always dominant in intellectual thought. It has had little influence (under either tsars or Communists) on the fields of nationality policy, policy towards religion or foreign policy. Today, as in the nineteenth century, its adherents can be opponents or supporters of the existing State structure. The growth of non-Russian nationalism under Gorbachov, combined with glasnost', has fuelled Russian nationalism. This is unlikely to be co-opted into the official ideology, because it would increase the dissatisfaction of the non-Russians.

This thesis is about the renegotiation of Russia’s Far Eastern and Northwestern borders as political and economic spaces. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the opening of these formerly closed borders which provided Russia’s border-regions with opportunities to develop links within the post-Soviet, as well as international political and economic landscapes. From 1992 onwards, their ability to cope with unfolding economic crisis and political uncertainty, which characterized the process of transition in Russia, was considered to be tied to establishing economic and political cross-border links with neighbouring European and Northeast Asian countries. Using the Republic of Karelia and Khabarovskiy kray as case studies, their development and that of their borders as political and economic spaces is analysed, applying the analytical framework developed in this thesis, according to which the complexity of borders can be best grasped by assessing the activities of border actors and institutions at all levels of governance, as well as the interaction of factors pertaining to the border’s spatio-infrastructural, economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions. The findings show that both regions’ borders have been renegotiated to different extents, but that neither the Republic of Karelia nor Khabarovskiy kray have been able to utilise their borders as opportunity structures to the extent originally anticipated. Main problems have been the distinct lack of scope for regional and local state and non-state actors to get sufficiently involved in the governance of their borders as well as the imbalance between the Asian and European vectors in Russian policy-making. The thesis concludes by proposing a system of multi-layered, heterarchic political and economic governance on both regions’ borders with the development of border-spanners and border-spanning institutions at the centre of such a strategy.

This historical dissertation investigates the international proliferation of Fordism in politically illiberal settings during the 1920s and 1930s. Based on American, German, and Soviet primary sources, it is the first archive-based study of this process. The dissertation's main finding is that the implementation of Ford's ideas and practices was a key component of illiberal modernization drives - that is, projects of state-led economic growth which explicitly fashioned themselves as alternatives to Western liberal capitalism. This point of view is a departure from previous accounts of the global success of Fordism, which subsume the story under the spread of American market capitalism or portray it as a process of quasi-self-explanatory technology transfer. It is also distinct from the well-known approach in history and the social sciences that describes Fordism as a specifically capitalist production regime (in distinction to a later post-Fordism). The argument pursued here requires a re-interpretation of Ford Motor Company's position within the American corporate arena of the 1920s and 1930s. Undertaken in the opening chapter, this re-examination characterizes the production practice of Ford Motor Company as an illiberal strategic alternative to the American business mainstream. Subsequent chapters trace the reception of Ford's political and business writings abroad, reconstruct the Nazi and Soviet motorization effort in the wake of Ford's model, and examine the transfer of Ford's mass production techniques to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The empirical results show that motorization and productive efficiency, both associated with Ford's innovations, became hallmarks of illiberal modernization efforts in these countries. The dissertation highlights the importance of non-market motivations for economic actors and policy-makers. It introduces the term illiberal modernism to describe the motivating power of ideology on economic practice during the interwar years. / History

In both the 1936 and 1977 USSR Constitutions conscientious labour in socially useful activity was decreed to be a "duty and matter of honour" for every Soviet citizen. This study examines the various approaches adopted by successive Soviet leaderships in their determined efforts to reinforce that ethos. It focuses, in particular, on the so-called "anti-parasite" laws dating back to 1957, when as a part of Khrushchev's attempt to revive popular justice, several smaller republics experimented with enactments that permitted peer justice institutions in the form of amorphous social assemblies to exile "parasites" via a procedure which bypassed the existing court system. Special attention is devoted to the criticism lodged against the laws (during their adoption and spread to the other union republics in 1961) by members of the legal profession, who complained that the wide punitive given to the extra-judicial bodies and the attitudes and behaviour encouraged in them would erode the respect for "socialist legality" which they had been charged with enhancing in the minds of the mass public. Although as a result of such criticism, the Khrushchev regime modified the peer justice institutions in the early 1960's, and even though his populism was absorbed by or subordinated to the normative sector of social control in Brezhnev's legal policy, the study highlights the fact that complaints of abuses and inconsistencies in anti-parasite proceedings continued to be levelled against the prosecution process. This, it is contended, was due in large part to the extreme vagueness of the notion of social parasitism itself, although the lack of a precise and consistent definition of this peculiar offence (and of the key elements which were deemed to constitute it) was actually seen as necessary and even desirable since it allowed the authorities to use the anti-parasite legislation as a weapon of suppression against a broad spectrum of socially, politically, and economically inconvenient groups within Soviet society.

This work seeks both to modify and challenge the prevailing view of an ideologically-driven Army intent on realizing Hitler's racist goals in the Soviet Union. One way of measuring the ideological commitment of the Army's soldiers is through an examination of the divisional level. Each of the three divisions under examination was recruited from a geographically and culturally distinct area, allowing the soldiers of the 121st, 123rd and 126th Infantry Divisions to recreate the sense of community unique to their home region: East Prussia, Berlin and Rhineland-Westphalia, respectively. The differences between social classes, traditional political allegiances and confessions found in these regions was thus transferred to these divisions and these distinctions allow for a more precise investigation of what types of men were more or less likely to subscribe to the German war of annihilation in the Soviet Union. Unlike much of the literature which examines the ideological nature of the war and the military conflict separately, this study looks at combat and occupation in tandem. Through the use of official military records, ranging from the Army down to the regimental level, as well as previously unused diaries and letters written by the men of these three divisions, a complex and varied picture of the German Army's activities and motivations arises. Firstly, while ideological concerns certainly played a role in determining the actions of these divisions, other more tangible problems, such as food and clothing shortages and numerical weakness, were more important issues in determining the Army's frequent savage interactions with civilians. Second, instead of the war serving to increasingly radicalize the behavior of the troops, the German Army began to significantly modify its conduct in hopes of winning the cooperation of Soviet civilians in late 1942 and 1943 before reverting to Scorched Earth policy in 1944. Internal mechanisms within the Army led to these changes in behavior: when a conciliatory policy was viewed as necessary to win the war, it was implemented; when the Army believed unadulterated violence was the means to victory, radical policies were carried out its forces. / text

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