No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

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.

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) remains one of the most controversial figures in twentieth century history. There is no consensus about his character or historical achievements-as either thinker or actor. To Winston Churchill, writing in the 1930s, Trotsky was a 'cancer bacillus'. The Stalinist anathema placed on him is well-known. For Tony Cliff, a contemporary socialist writer, on the other hand, Trotsky was a 'man of genius'. Whatever assessment may be made about Trotsky, one of his lesser biographers and critics makes the point fairly enough that 'compared to his famous colleagues, Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky has been sorely neglected by historians and other scholars'. The upheaval in the USSR and its successor state system, and in Eastern Europe and China, since the mid-1980s, when CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev launched his programme of radical change under the sobriquets 'glasnost' and 'perestroika', has brought into the foreground once again the historical issues concerning the origins, character and consequences of the Stalinist system of 'totalitarian' political rule with its attendant hyper-centralised command economy. The whole experience of Stalinism has been, and no doubt will continue to be, subjected to intensive historical reconsideration as Russian scholars in particular seek to come to terms with the October Revolution and its legacy within the context of their national past. The publication of some of Trotsky's writings in Russian language editions and their circulation within the territories of the Russian Federation makes available an assessment and analysis of the Stalinist experience previously denied to the Russian reader. It is against this background that the author has written an historical review of Trotsky's major writings on the question of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The approach adopted utilizes a combination of chronological exposition and analytical commentary, in the belief that both of these aspects of historical writing are necessary and valid. As Arthur Marwick has commented: '... if history without analysis is meaningless, without chronology it does not exist'. Marxist ideas have had a wide currency in the century and the contribution to the body of Marxist doctrine and theory by Leon Trotsky deserves closer attention. This study of Trotsky's attempt to make a Marxist analysis and assessment of the experience of Stalinism in the Soviet Union has been carried through in the belief that the examination of the critical and minority current within the broader mainstream of the international socialist movement has much to offer in contributing to our knowledge and understanding of the one of the most significant developments in twentieth century political history. A critical and historical assessment of Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism makes a contribution both to our appreciation of Trotsky's ideas and to our understanding of a phenomenon which looms large in any discussion of the broader contours of twentieth century history.

The diploma thesis presented points out the presence of religious elements in Marxist-Leninist ideology. It examines the writings of the godfathers of this ideology(Marx, Engels, Lenin, or other less familiar Marxist, focusing specifically on their attitude to religion and religious thought in general. The thesis draws attention to the cognate elements of Christianiny and the very essence of Marxist-Leninist ideology, especially in terms of similar perception of historic eras of social development. The exposition is not limit to a description of Marxist theoretical attitudes assumed towards religious thoughts; the practical realization of these attitudes in Lenin- and Stalin-governed Russia is also investigated.

Hamlet a longtemps été une partie inséparable de l'identité nationale russe. Cependant, les mises en scène d’Hamlet en Union soviétique (surtout en Russie) durant l'époque de Staline présentèrent des problèmes spécifiques liés aux doctrines idéologiques imposées sur les arts et la culture en général ainsi qu’aux idées reçues concernant l’opinion personnelle de Staline envers de la tragédie. Les deux mises en scènes principales d’Hamlet en Russie au cours de cette période ont été celles réalisées par Nikolai Akimov (1932) et Sergei Radlov (1938). Un réexamen approfondi de ces mises en scène, entrepris dans les chapitres centraux de cette thèse, révèle des détails précédemment inconnus au sujet de leurs conceptions, réalisations, réceptions et au-delà. Cela met en évidence l'importance du rôle de la musique de scène composée pour elles par Dimitri Chostakovitch et par Sergei Prokofiev, respectivement, et suggère l'interaction complexe des agendas individuels et institutionnels. Ce travail a été rendu possible grâce à de nombreuses visites aux archives russes, qui contiennent de précieux documents tels que des livrets des mises en scène et les rapports sténographiques de discussions, précédemment non référencées à l'Ouest. Ces chapitres centraux sont précédés d'un aperçu historique d’Hamlet en Russie et de la musique et de Shakespeare en général. Ils sont suivis par une enquête au sujet des adaptations notables d’Hamlet à la fin de l’époque de Staline et après la mort du dictateur, se concentrant sur ceux qui contiennent les contributions musicales les plus importantes. Le résultat est un aperçu plus riche et plus complexe de l'image familière d’Hamlet comme miroir de la société russe / soviétique. / Hamlet has long been an inseparable part of Russian national identity. Staging Hamlet in Russia during the Stalin era, however, presented particular problems connected with the ideological framework imposed on the arts and culture as well as with Stalin’s own negative perceived view of the tragedy. The two major productions of Hamlet in Russia during this period were those directed by Nikolai Akimov (1932) and Sergei Radlov (1938). Thorough re-examination of these productions, as undertaken in the central chapters of this dissertation, reveals much previously unknown detail about their conception, realisation, reception and afterlife. It highlights the importance of the role of music composed for them by Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, respectively, and it suggests a complex interaction of individual and institutional agendas. This work has been made possible by numerous visits to Russian archives, which contain invaluable documents such as production books and stenographic reports of discussions, previously unreferenced in Western scholarship. These central chapters are preceded by a historical overview of Hamlet in Russia and of music and Shakespeare in general. They are followed by a survey of major adaptations of Hamlet in the late-Stalin era and beyond, concentrating on those with significant musical contributions. The outcome is a richer and more complex account of the familiar image of Hamlet as a mirror of Russian/Soviet society.

In 1950 Pavel Kohout published under the title O černém a bílém [‘About the black and the white’] a book of fairy tales, which appeared in 1953 in East Germany under the title Dreizehn rote Rosen [‘Thirteen red roses’]. If one can still recognize elements of (literary) fairy tales in the original agitative text, these are largely obliterated in the translation. The fairy tales lose the elements that marked them as fairy tales. In East Germany, the early Soviet fairy tale criticism, which had lost its sharpness at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, is taken over, while in Czechoslovakia it is still represented only by orthodox criticism.

No description available.

No description available.