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En décembre 1920, en même temps que l’Arménie était soviétisée, la Section française de l’Internationale communiste (SFIC) – Parti communiste français (PCF) à partir de 1922 – naissait du Congrès de Tours. Les réfugiés arméniens qui arrivent en France au début des années 1920 – originaires de l’Empire ottoman et rescapés, pour la plupart, du génocide orchestré par les Jeunes-Turcs – vont être doublement sollicités par le monde communiste : par le PCF qui, trois ans après sa création, met en place des groupes de langue afin d’encadrer les travailleurs immigrés qui affluent sur le marché du travail après la Première Guerre mondiale, et par l’Arménie soviétique en tant qu’entité diasporique d’une nationalité intégrée à l’URSS. Tandis que le PCF, à travers son groupe de langue arménienne, veut amener les Arméniens à prendre part aux mouvements sociaux qu’il impulse, et accroître chez eux le sentiment internationaliste, le pouvoir soviétique, use, à l’inverse, du sentiment national présent en diaspora afin de mieux y contrecarrer l’influence des partisans d’une « Arménie libre et indépendante ». Ce que l’on nomme « mouvance communiste arménienne » est la partie de la communauté arménienne de France composée d’un noyau dur d’Arméniens encartés au PCF et qui, par cercles concentriques s’élargit aux sympathisants, aux prosoviétiques puis à ceux qui soutiennent l’Arménie « fût-elle soviétique ». Disputant, dès les années 1920, le contrôle de la communauté arménienne à la Fédération révolutionnaire arménienne (FRA) - parti qui dirigeait la République d’Arménie renversée par les bolchéviques et qui s’était reconstitué en exil – la mouvance communiste arménienne de France disparaît avec la chute de l’URSS. / In December 1920, while Armenia was being sovietized, the French Communist Party (PCF) was founded during the Tours Socialist Congress. Armenian refugees arriving in France in the beginning of the 1920s, mostly survivors of the genocide committed by the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, were going to be doubly requested by the communist world : on the one hand, as migrant workers requiring orderly organization, they are taken in charge by the PCF and on the other as a diasporic entity of a nationality now included in the USSR, they are also targeted by Soviet Armenia. Unlike the PCF which aims at involving Armenians in social struggles and increasing their internationalist feelings, Soviet power takes advantage of patriotic feelings spread among diasporic armenians in order to better thwart "free and independent Armenia" supporters’ influence. Made of PCF members and more broadly prosoviet Armenians, this so-called "French Armenian Communist movement” fade away with the collapse of the USSR.

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This thesis provides a critique of existing understandings of the Cold War in International Relations theory, and offers an alternative position. It rejects the conventional conceptual and temporal understanding of the Cold War, which assumes that the Cold War was, essentially, a political-military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that originated in the collapse of the wartime alliance after 1945. Using a method derived from historical materialism, in particular the parcellization of political power into the spheres of 'politics' and 'economics' that characterises capitalist modernity, the thesis develops an alternative understanding of the Cold War through an emphasis on the historical and thus conceptual uniqueness of it. After the literature survey, Part One interrogates the conceptual areas of the state, military power and social revolution and offers alternative conceptualisations. This is followed in Part Two with a more historically orientated argument that analyses Soviet and American responses to the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. The main conclusions of the thesis consist of the following. First, the thesis suggests that the form of politics in the USSR (and other 'revolutionary' states) was qualitatively different to that of capitalist states. This derived from the relationship between the form of political rule and the social relations of material production. Secondly, this conflict was not reducible to the 'superpowers' but rather, was conditioned by a dynamic associated with the expansion and penetration of capitalist social relations, and the contestation of those political forms that evolved from them. Finally, the relationship between capitalist expansion and the 'superpowers' rested on the distinctive forms of international relations of each superpower over how each related to the international system and responded to revolution.

Thesis advisor: Philip G. Altbach / This study traces the policy and implementation of internationalization in the Russian higher education system from 1917 to the present. The analysis suggests that international academic policy has been applied by the Russian state continuously, though with radically differing emphasis and mechanisms, through the last hundred years. Chapter One presents the research questions, design and methodology of the study. Chapter Two reviews scholarly literature related to academic internationalization and situates this definition within the context of Russian higher education. Chapters 3-5 explore the role of international activities in Russian higher education during the seventy years of the Soviet era. Trends in Soviet academic international policy related to three major historical periods are discussed in this section: a) the initial Bolshevik program for global academic reform; b) Sovietization of higher education in the countries of Communist Bloc; and c) East-West international academic competition during the Cold War period. Chapters 6-7 address the role of internationalization in the reformation of Russian higher education during the last two decades of Post-Soviet period. This section examines the extent and likely outcomes of these changes. This research demonstrates that Russian higher education has had a continuous international aspect, though organized differently than Western structures. The analysis also suggests that key organizational components of the Soviet administrative system still exist in the current Russian higher education structure. The current implementation of internationalization presents Russian academics with an opportunity to enforce academic professionalism and promote their status as global academics. At the same time, however, state organization and governing administration principles of Russian higher education continue to reduce academics to functional executors of state directives and deliverers of vocational training. In this way, internationalization serves as a critical nexus for the collision of traditional administrative structures with the new aspirations of Russian academics. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

This thesis examines a little studied aspect of the Soviet Union’s history, namely the activities of the mass membership of the Communist Party during the interwar period, specifically 1926-1941. Based on extensive research in central and regional party archives, it revisits a number of specialised scholarly debates by offering an account of key processes and events of the period, including rapid industrialisation and mass repression, from the viewpoint of rank-and-file communists, the group of people who had chosen to profess active support for the regime without however acquiring positions of political power. The account provided is in the form of an in-depth case study of the party organisation of the Red Putilov – later Kirov – machine-building plant in the city of Leningrad, followed by a shorter study of communist activism in another major Leningrad institution, the Red-Banner Baltic Fleet. It is shown that all major political initiatives of the leadership generated intense political activity at the bottom levels of the party hierarchy, as the thousands of rank-and-file members interpreted and acted on central directives in ways that were consistently in line with their and their colleagues’ interests. As these interests were hardly ever in harmony with those of the corresponding level of the administrative state apparatus, the result was a nearly permanent state of tension between the executive and political branches of the Soviet party-state at the grassroots level. The main argument offered is that ultimately, the rank-and-file organisations of the communist party were an extremely important but contradictory element of the Soviet Union’s political system, being a reliable constituency of grassroots support for the regime while at the same time placing significant limits on the ability of state organs to actually implement policy. This thesis therefore challenges interpretations of Soviet state-society relations based on binary narratives of repression from above and resistance from below. It identifies instead an element of the Soviet system where the line between society and the state became blurred, and grassroots agency became possible on the basis of a minimum level of active support for the regime. It is further argued that the ability of the mass membership to influence the outcome of leadership initiatives was predicated on the Marxist-Leninist ideological underpinnings of most major policies. In this way, this thesis also contributes to the recent literature on the role of ideology in the Soviet system. The concluding chapter considers the value of the overall findings of this thesis for the comparative study of 20th century socialist states.

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