The present thesis analyzes the cultural image of the Russian neo-Romantic writer Alexander Grin (1880-1932) as it has been constructed by Soviet ideology and received in Soviet popular culture since the late 1950s. The topic of the thesis is unique, and it has not yet been investigated before. The thesis explores three major aspects of Grin's representation in Soviet culture: critical, fictional and cinematic. The first part "Critical representation of Grin's works in the USSR" focuses upon the process of construction and development of ideological "myths about Grin" in the system of Soviet culture. It demonstrates and analyzes the transformation of the official and public attitude to Grin's works from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second part is entitled "Representation of Grin's image in Soviet fiction: Grin as a fictional character". Through the coherent analysis of three Soviet novels (introducing Alexander Grin as a protagonist), it explores the phenomenon of the transformation of both the personal and socio-cultural attitudes to Grin. The fictional works are viewed in chronological order: The Black Sea by Konstantin Paustovsky (Chernoe more, 1935), The Wizard from Gel'-Giu by Leonid Borisov (Volshebnik iz Gel'-Giu, 1944) and The Lord of Chances by Valentin Zorin (Povelitel' sluchaynostey, 1977-79). The third part concentrates entirely on the Cinematic representation of Grin's works on the Soviet screen, analyzing five major film-versions of Grin's works: Scarlet Sails (Alye parusa, dir. Ptushko, 1961), She Who Runs the Waves (Begushchaya po volnam, dir. Lubimov, 1967), Shining World (Blistayushchiy mir, dir. Mansurov, 1984), The Golden Chain (Zolotaya Tsep , dir. Muratov, 1986), Mister Designer (Gospodin oformitel', dir. Teptsov, 1986). The study of Grin's case offers a unique opportunity to investigate how the old ideological myths are occupying the minds of younger generations nowadays. Grin is still a "cult figure" for Russian society, but it remains to be investigated to what extent his contemporary image (and the image of his fiction) is influenced by the old models of the Soviet era.

The diploma thesis is devoted to the analysis of anti-religious propaganda conducted by the Bolshevik government in the 1920s and 1930s on the example of materials published in the Bezbozhnik magazine. The work outlines the historical context of the Soviet anti-religious policy of the interwar period, and describes the activities of the main anti-religious organization, the League of Militant Atheists and its leader Yemelyan Yaroslavsky. Furthermore, the publishing activities of the League of Militant Atheists and the network of periodicals published by it are described. In its core the work focuses on the analysis of the main anti-religious periodical, which was the newspaper and later the magazine Bezbožnik. The basic methods of propaganda used by this periodical are described in connection with the propagandistic character of contemporary Soviet art. Special attention is paid to the illustrative material in the magazine, especially the anti-religious cartoon and its sources. The work is a contribution to understanding the functioning of communist totalitarian ideology and its influence in the media space.

The diploma thesis is devoted to the analysis of anti-religious propaganda conducted by the Bolshevik government in the 1920s and 1930s on the example of materials published in the Bezbozhnik magazine. The work outlines the historical context of the Soviet anti-religious policy of the interwar period, and describes the activities of the main anti-religious organization, the League of Militant Atheists and its leader Yemelyan Yaroslavsky. Furthermore, the publishing activities of the League of Militant Atheists and the network of periodicals published by it are described. In its core the work focuses on the analysis of the main anti-religious periodical, which was the newspaper and later the magazine Bezbožnik. The basic methods of propaganda used by this periodical are described in connection with the propagandistic character of contemporary Soviet art. Special attention is paid to the illustrative material in the magazine, especially the anti-religious cartoon and its sources. The work is a contribution to understanding the functioning of communist totalitarian ideology and its influence in the media space.

This thesis examines the interaction of Georgian painting and national politics in the first two decades of Soviet power in Georgia, 1921-1939, focussing in particular on the period following the consolidation of Stalin's power at the helm of the Communist Party in 1926-7. In the Stalin era, Georgians enjoyed special status among Soviet nations thanks to Georgia's prestige as the place of Stalin's birth. However, Georgians' advanced sense of their national sovereignty and initial hostility towards Bolshevik control following Georgia's Sovietisation in 1921 also resulted in Georgia's uniquely fraught relationship with Soviet power in Moscow in the decades that followed. In light of these circumstances, this thesis explores how and why the experience and activities of Georgian painters between 1926 and 1939 differed from those of other Soviet artists. One of its central arguments is that the experiences of Georgian artists and critics in this period not only differed significantly from those of artists and critics of other republics, but that the uniqueness of their experience was precipitated by a complex network of factors resulting from the interaction of various political imperatives and practical circumstances, including those relating to Soviet national politics. Chapter one of this thesis introduces the key institutions and individuals involved in producing, evaluating and setting the direction of Georgian painting in the 1920s and early 1930s. Chapters two and three show that artists and critics in Georgia as well as commentators in Moscow in the 1920s and 30s were actively engaged in efforts to interpret the Party's demand for 'national form' in Soviet culture and to suggest what that form might entail as regards Georgian painting. However, contradictions inherent in Soviet nationalities policy, which both demanded the active cultivation of cultural difference between Soviet nationalities and eagerly anticipated a time when national distinctions in all spheres would naturally disappear, made it impossible for an appropriate interpretation of 'national form' to be identified. Chapter three, moreover, demonstrates how frequent shifts in Soviet cultural and nationalities policies presented Moscow institutions with a range of practical challenges which ultimately prevented them from reflecting in their exhibitions and publications the contemporary artistic activity taking place in the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. A key finding of chapters four and five concerns the uniquely significant role that Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's ruthless deputy and the head of the Georgian and Transcaucasian Party organisations, played in differentiating Georgian painters' experiences from those of Soviet artists of other nationalities. Beginning in 1934, Beria employed Georgian painters to produce an exhibition of monumental paintings, opening at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1937, depicting episodes from his own falsified history of Stalin's role in the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia. As this thesis shows, the production of the exhibition introduced an unprecedented degree of direct Party supervision over Georgian painting as Beria personally critiqued works by Georgian painters produced on prescribed narrative subjects in a centralised collective studio. As well as representing a major contribution to Stalin's personality cult, the exhibition, which conferred on Georgian painters special responsibility for representing Stalin and his activities, was also a public statement of the special status that the Georgians were now to enjoy, second only to that of the Russians. However, this special status involved both special privileges and special responsibilities. Georgians would enjoy special access to opportunities in Moscow and a special degree of autonomy in local governance, but in return they were required to lead the way in declaring allegiance to the Stalin regime. Chapter six returns to the debate about 'national form' in Georgian painting by examining how the pre-Revolutionary self-taught Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmani, was discussed by cultural commentators in Georgia and Moscow in the 1920s and 30s as a source informing a Soviet or Soviet Georgian canon of painting. It shows that, in addition to presenting views on the suitability of Pirosmani's painting either in terms of its formal or class content, commentators perpetuated and developed a cult of Pirosmani steeped in stereotypes of a Georgian 'national character.' Further, the establishment of this cult during the late 1920s and early 1930s seems to have been a primary reason for the painter's subsequent canonisation in the second half of the 1930s as a 'Great Tradition' of Soviet Georgian culture. It helped to articulate a version of Georgian national identity that was at once familiar and gratifying for Georgians and useful for the Soviet regime. The combined impression of cultural sovereignty embodied in this and other 'Great Traditions' of Soviet Georgian culture and the special status articulated through the 1937 exhibition allowed Georgian nationalism to be aligned, for a time, with support for Stalin and the Soviet regime.

My thesis examines visual and written culture of the interwar Soviet Union dealing with the body as an object of public observation, appreciation, and critique. It explores how the need to construct new Soviet subjectivities was realised through the figure of the body. I explore the representation of ‘physical culture’ (fizkul’tura), with reference to newspapers, specialist fizkul’tura and medical journals, and Party debates. This textual discourse is considered alongside visual primary sources – documentary and non-fiction film and photography, painting and sculpture, and feature films. In my analysis of these visual primary sources I identify three ‘categories of looking’ – surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship – that I claim structure representations of the embodied Soviet subject. My introduction incorporates a brief history of early Soviet social psychological conceptualisations of the body, outlining the coercive renovative project of Soviet subjectification and introducing the notion of surveillance. My first and second chapters explore bodily aesthetics. The first focuses on non-fiction media from the mid- to late-1920s that capture the sporting body in action; this chapter introduces the notion of spectatorship and begins to unpack the ideological function of how bodies are observed. The second further explores questions of bodily aesthetics, now in relation to fizkul’tura painting and Abram Room’s 1936 film, Strogii iunosha. My third chapter looks at fizkul’tura feature films from the mid- 1930s to explore how bodies were related to social questions of gender and sexuality, including marriage and pregnancy. My final chapter focuses on cinematic representations of football from the late 1930s and the relationship between bodies on display and onlooking crowds. These two chapters together indicate how the dynamic between the body and its spectator (whether individual or in a group) was reimagined in the late interwar years; the body’s aesthetic appeal is now of little importance compared to its ability to constitute a public subjectivity through the manipulation of emotion, trauma, and pathos.

This dissertation deals with how science fiction reflects the shift in cultural paradigms that occurred in the Soviet Union between the 1960s and the 1970s. Interest was displaced from the rational to the irrational, from a scientific-technologically oriented optimism about the future to art, religion, philosophy and metaphysics. Concomitant with this shift in interests was a shift from the future to an elsewhere or, reformulated in exclusively spatial terms, from utopia to heterotopia. The dissertation consists of an analysis of three novels by the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady, 1925-1991 and Boris 1933-2012): Inspector Glebsky’s Puzzle (Otel’ U pogibšego al’pinista, 1970), The Kid (Malyš, 1971) and Roadside Picnic (Piknik na obočine, 1972) and two films Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (Hukkunud alpinisti hotell/ Otel’ U pogibšego al’pinista, Kromanov, 1979) and Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1980).  The three novels, allegedly treatments of the theme of contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, were intended to be published in one volume with the title Unexpected Encounters. The films are based on two of the novels. In the novels an earlier Marxist utopia has given way to a considerably more ambiguous heterotopia, largely envisioned as versions of the West. An indication of how the authors here seem to look back towards history rather than forward towards the future is to be found in the persistent strain of literary Gothic that runs through the novels. This particular trait resurfaces in the films as well.  The films reflect how tendencies only discernable in the novels have developed throughout the decade, such as the budding Soviet consumer culture and the religious sensibilities of the artistic community.

The thesis focuses on the staging of Soviet operettas in Czechoslovakia between 1946 and 1987. The import of the Soviet repertoire to Czechoslovak operetta theaters was linked to the cultural and political transformations at the outset of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The so-called Soviet socialist operetta would soon have been established as a model for new Czechoslovak operettas. As such, it became an important part of the repertoire which was influenced by the official polical system. The thesis surveys the progressing intensity of the import and the developing operetta genre in the Soviet Union. On the examples of Isaac Dunayevsky's operettas Free Wind and, more intensively, White Acacia, in comparison with the original versions of these operettas, it shows the tendencies of interpretation of Soviet operettas in Czechoslovakia, in the changing cultural and political context. The thesis also concerns the topic of critical perception in both cultural environments and, overall, it aspires to capture the examined topics in the widest possible contextual horizon.